• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 9, 2016

At least Google+ isn’t alone. Another big tech company is pulling back from its attempt to launch a social network in competition with Facebook and Twitter, with the revelation that Apple is turning down the volume on Connect, the social component of Apple Music.

Connect was intended to help fans connect and interact with their favorite musicians, and allow the latter to post photos and video of live performances as well as other content from their tours. In previous versions of the operating system Connect was featured prominently along Music’s top-level navigation bar, along “My Music,” “Playlists” and the “iTunes Store.”

However Connect failed to, um, connect with users, doubtless because many of the same functions are already handled, arguably better, by Facebook and Twitter – and Apple, reluctant as always to cede real estate to rivals, didn’t create a mechanism for easy cross-posting from the big social platforms.

With the coming iOS 10 revamp due out in the second half of the year, Create will give up its independent tab in the navigation bar, relegated into a sub-category in the separate “For You” tab, containing Apple Music’s listening recommendations, according to 9to5Mac, which first reported the news.

As committed Apple watchers noted, Connect was actually Apple’s second ill-fated foray into social media built around its popular music services. Previously, in 2010 Apple introduced Ping, which enabled users to connect with friends as well as their favorite artists, with related social features including commenting and custom song and album lists. Apple pulled the plug on Ping in 2012.

As noted, Apple is hardly the first tech platform to discover that consumers aren’t really interested in another social network offering largely redundant features. Google+, Google’s chronically underused social platform, has been dying the death of a thousand cuts in recent years. Last year it was chopped up into its main component parts, photos and streams, and in 2014 Google stopped requiring new users to create Google+ accounts; it also stopped using Google+ logins as cross-platform credentials for Google-owned sites like YouTube.