Larry Page is not using Google+

EMBARRASSINGLY ENOUGH for Google it appears that its CEO cannot be bothered to use the firm's Google+ social networking service.

Google+ has been live for about three months now, and while it has gathered a lot of interest at the start it does appear that its popularity is waning. Perhaps this is most obviously seen in the fact that Google's CEO Larry Page has stopped using it.

Page, writes the Daily Mail newspaper, was quite a passionate user at the start of the service, but in what the paper described as a bad PR move, he stopped using Google+ about four weeks ago. This, says the Daily Wail, is enough to spark rumours that the service's popularity is coming to an abrupt end.

It is possible, of course, that someone fed this story and the angle on it to the Daily Mail, someone from a rival social networking service ,for example, but we cannot say, only speculate.

Facebook, of course, once hired a PR company to besmirch Google, and despite at first fudging about the issue it later admitted that this was in fact the case.

Burson Marsteller, the PR company in question, admitted that it and Facebook were behind a bad mouthing campaign against Google and its privacy systems, and it apologised for being misleading. Surely the opposite of rule number one in the 'Big Book of Being a Public Relations company'.

Google+ has managed to pull together some ten million users in the first few weeks, which was a milestone celebrated by Page while he was still using the service.

According to the Daily Mail, and Page's own Google+ account, he has not posted there since 15 August. Maybe he's been on vacation. µ