It’s been a long and slow death to watch, but Google has finally announced they will be shutting down Google+ for consumers after 7 years. The shutdown will take place over the next 10 months, with announcements to come in the future which include how to download and migrate your data. The death of Google+ was one that was long coming. To Google’s own admittance, Google+ had very low usage and 90% of Google+ sessions lasted less than 5 seconds.
The final nail in the proverbial coffin for Google+ was a potential data breach that was discovered in March. The breach resulted from a bug in an API, with up to 500,000 Google+ accounts potentially affected. Google claims that there is no evidence that the data was misused. This potential breach wasn’t reported back in March, when it was discovered, but now is listed as one of the reasons for shuttering Google+.
Obviously this will mean very little for most, as Google+ really failed to grab a hold in the competitive social media space. Since the exit of Vic Gundotra (the man tasked with creating and heading the Google+ team) in 2014, Google+ had a lack of direction or commitment from Google. From 2014 on Google slowly started separating Google+ from their other properties, like search and Youtube.
We embraced Google+ early on as an alternative to the noise on Facebook and liked the ability to communicate more content than Twitter. Participation in Google+ also appeared to have social ranking factors within the Google index and Google+ also had an integrated Google Hangout video conferencing feature. Back then we tried to promote our Google+ presence, tested using hangouts to conduct interviews and joined and communicated with others who joined developer-related groups. But then Google+ lost steam and we’ve been watching it slowly die. So on top of all the other day-to-day activity we have going on, we’ll be working on taking mentions of Google+ out of our sites and communications.
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