Google Authorship : The End

Google has withdrawn its authorship program from showing into the Search Results

Google had started the authorship program 3 years back when it started supporting the rel='author' tag & later started showing author photos in the search results. Now, since June 2014 Google stopped showing the author photos & later in August 2014 stopped supporting the rel='author' tag altogether.
Reasons stated were :

1. Low adoption rates by authors & webmasters.
2. Low value for searchers.
3. Minute difference in clickthrough rates

"Don't be evil (Google)" tool

Haha! This is amazing! Exactly what I pointed out in my post, Real reason why Google Plus exists
outlined in this post by Danny Sullivan.

I’ve written that Google has plenty of public data to allow parts its new Search Plus Your World feature to be inclusive of rival social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now, those networks are proving that true, through a new “Don’t Be Evil” tool that lets anyone leverage Google’s own results to see this.
The tool — a bookmarklet that works in your browser — changes three parts of Search Plus Your World that currently shows information only from Google Plus. These are:

• People & Pages results
• Google+ Sitelinks
• Google+ Suggestions In Autocomplete

Real Reason why Google Plus exists

It has nothing to do with Social Media or competing with facebook. Not even closely.

What I think the real reason for existence of Google Plus is not social media but social searching. Think of it, where do you see the Google Plus button or icon most often, on the Google Search results page.

Facebook versus Google +

The Grand battle between facebook & google has begun again! Again, because the earlier battles were lost by Google, namely orkut, google me (which was never launched full fledgedly)

A lot of excitement has been around google plus, but it all seems to be dying out already. According to the stats, close to 20 Million people are already on Google + (remarkable given the amount of time they've been online) but the visitor stats & time spent by users on google plus is already falling, especially since the Facebook Skype collaboration! With the facebook & the skype user base, it totally roots out hangouts (where anyway just 10 people can "hang out" at a time)

Besides that, facebook enjoys the patronage of the whole web! Especially, with all the open social & web apps developed using facebook APIs, facebook has become an integral part of the web!

Another critical factor is, Brands & Businesses! Google Plus still hasn't rolled out anything comparable to Facebook Pages,whereas facebook is already planning to go to the next level this fall.

Though nobody is sure what the next level for facebook is going to be, but experts have speculated some tremendous changes coming up that might totally root out competition for facebook!

Faceboo or Google, whom do you think will be the Lord of Social Media?