Well, that’s a bummer. Google+ warned it would remove business sites, but it looks like it’s removed CBC News. 
Bad idea.
It had been ages since I’d visited my Google + profile (ages in G+ years = a few days). This morning I thought I’d check the CBC News G+ page and see what’s up, partly for news and partly to see what they’re doing these days to differentiate their G+ presence from their Facebook page. Now I’m really wondering what’s up, because it’s a “profile not found.”
G+ took CBC News down?
I actually agree with G+ on the “businesses, hold off for now” approach. As an analogy, many commercial accounts are beginning to kind of ruin Twitter, in my view.
Journalism, however, is in a different category from other commercial enterprises. (This is so even without looking at the question of public-sector versus private-sector journalism, which is another conversation). Twitter has become one of my main sources of news. One way I use it is akin to an interactive RSS feed. CBC News, other CBC, and other journalistic Twitter accounts are some of my main information sources there. On Google+, profiles such as CBC News have sparked good, informed conversations. I chose to have CBC News in my circles (and was pleased to be in theirs) because these types of conversations there are one of the reasons I want to use a social network.
CBC News plays host to good conversations on Facebook as well, but G+ isn’t Facebook; it offers other possibilities and I am interested in what CBC and other journalistic outfits are pursuing here. Early on we had some discussions about what CBC News can do on G+; those conversations are lost to most of us now.
I’ve said in several places now that, although G+ looks like Facebook, it offers the broader informative potential of Twitter, without a 140 character limit on good discussions. It’s a shame to see that direction turn with the deletion of a journalism profile, of all things.
