All Quiet

One of the knocks on Google+ was that it was a "ghost town," with no-one around. I'd never found this to be true, personally, mainly because in the early days, the Circles functionality made sweeping in lots of new people quick and painless. Sure, people drifted away from the platform, and so I started to see the same voices on a regular basis, but it never felt as empty as the tech press often made it out to be, although the absence of many major businesses was conspicuous.

About six months ago, however, Google removed the Next Blog feature from Blogger. It had been a fun pastime, now and again, pressing the button, and seeing what other blogs Google felt belonged in the same neighborhood as Nobody In Particular. And as much as I tended to feel that the choices it made were strange, Blogger feels somewhat lonely and isolated without it.

I don't know why the feature was removed, but I can come up with reasons that make sense to me. It had become more and more difficult to find blogs that were still being actively maintained via the Next Blog feature, and so, as time went on, it started to feel more and more like a tour of a dying neighborhood, where more and more of the homes were dark every time you came back. But still, there were fun little spaces tucked away in there, and interesting snippets of people's lives.

Nobody In Particular is a personal project, something I do almost for its own sake. I don't really advertise it, and I don't really have a soapbox for it, so it has never picked up that big of a following. And I expected as much. But still, I wonder if anyone ever stumbled upon it via the Next Blog button, and was curious about what they saw.