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Google+

Defunct social networking service

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Lab · Class 8–125-Day Design Sprint

Due to low user engagement and disclosed software design flaws that potentially allowed outside developers access to personal information of its users, the Google+ developer API was discontinued on March 7, 2019, and Google+ was shut down for business and personal use on April 2, 2019.

History

Release

Google+ was the company's fourth foray into social networking, following Google Buzz (introduced 2010, retired in 2011), Google Friend Connect (introduced 2008, retired in March 2012), and Orkut (introduced 2004, retired in September 2014).

Google+ was introduced in June 2011. Public Google Prifiles were merged into Google+ profiles while private Google Profiles were deleted. Google+ Features included the ability to post photos and status updates to the stream or interest-based communities, group different types of relationships (rather than simply "friends") into Circles, a multi-person instant messaging, text and video chat called Hangouts, events, location tagging, and the ability to edit and upload photos to private cloud-based albums.

According to a 2016 book by a former Facebook employee, some leaders at Facebook saw Google's foray into social networking as a serious threat to the company. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg instituted a company-wide "lockdown", signaling that employees were supposed to dedicate time to bringing Facebook's features into line with Google+.

Growth

Assessments of Google+ growth varied widely, because Google first defined the service as a social network, then later as "a social layer across all of Google's services", allowing them to share a user's identity and interests. According to Ars Technica, Google+ signups were "often just an incidental byproduct of signing up for other Google services."

In 2011, Google+ had 10 million users two weeks after the launch. In a month, it had 25 million. In October 2011, the service had 40 million users, according to Larry Page. At the end of 2011, Google+ had 90 million users. In October 2013, approximately 540 million monthly active users used the social layer by interacting with Google+'s enhanced properties, such as Gmail, the +1 button, and YouTube comments. Some 300 million monthly active users participated in the social network by interacting with the Google+ social-networking stream. According to ComScore, the biggest market was the United States followed by India.

Google+'s user engagement was lower than that of its competitors; ComScore estimated that the average amount of time spent by users on the site during the month of January 2012 amounted to only 3.3 minutes, while on Facebook this metric was over 136 times greater, at 7.5 hours. In March 2013, average time spent on the site had increased but remained low, at about 7 minutes according to Nielsen (not including traffic from apps). In February 2014, The New York Times likened Google+ to a ghost town, citing Google's stated 540 million "monthly active users" and noting that almost half did not visit the site. The company replied that the significance of Google+ was less as a Facebook competitor than as a means of gathering and connecting user information from Google's various services.

Changes in management and product direction

In April 2014, Vic Gundotra, the executive in charge of Google+, departed the company with management responsibility going to David Besbris. By March 2015, Google executive Bradley Horowitz, who had co-founded Google+ with Gundotra, had replaced Besbris, becoming vice president of streams, photos, and sharing.

In an interview with Steven Levy published on May 28, 2015, Horowitz said that Google+ was about to undergo a "huge shift" that would better reflect how the service is actually used. By that time, two core Google+ functions, communications and photos, had become standalone services. Google Photos, Google's photo and video library, was announced at the May 2015 Google I/O conference. Google Hangouts, Google's communications platform, was announced two years earlier, also at Google I/O. Google subsequently refocused Google+ on shared interests, removing features not supporting "an interest-based social experience". The company also eliminated the Google+ social layer; users no longer needed a Google+ profile to share content and communicate with contacts. The transition began with YouTube, where a Google+ profile was no longer required to create, upload, or comment on a channel, but a Google+ page was instead required. YouTube comments no longer appeared on Google+ or vice versa.

Redesign

On November 18, 2015, Google+ underwent a redesign with the stated intent of making the site simpler and faster, making the new features of Communities and Collections more prominent, and removing features such as Hangouts integration, Events and Custom URLs, though Events and Custom URLs were eventually added back.

Shutdown of consumer version

On October 8, 2018, Google announced it would be ending the consumer version of Google+ by the end of August 2019, later changing that date to April 2, 2019. The company cited low user engagement and difficulties in "creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets consumers' expectations", noting that 90% of user sessions on the service lasted less than five seconds. It also acknowledged a design flaw in an API that could expose private user data. Google said it found no evidence that "any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API" or that "any Profile data was misused."

According to The Wall Street Journal, the data exposure was discovered in the spring of 2018, and was not reported by the company because of fears of increased regulatory scrutiny. The newspaper said that "the move effectively puts the final nail in the coffin of a product that was launched in 2011 to challenge Facebook, and is widely seen as one of Google's biggest failures."

On December 10, 2018, Google reported that a subsequent Google+ API update exposed customer data for six days before being discovered, again saying there was no evidence of any breach. The bug allowed outside developers access to personal information of users. Over 52.5 million users were affected. The company moved the service's shutdown date to April 2019, and said it would "sunset all Google+ APIs in the next 90 days."

Shutdown of business version

On its business-oriented G Suite, Google replaced Google+ with a similar product called Google Currents, which facilitates internal communications. A few months after the Google+ closure, in July 2019, the company soft launched an experimental social networking platform called Shoelace, oriented toward organizing local activities and events. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Shoelace shut down on May 12, 2020. On June 5, 2020, Google announced that Currents would replace Google+ for all G Suite customers on July 6, 2020. On February 10, 2022, Google announced that it would be planning to "wind down" Currents and transition its users to Google Chat in 2023.

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