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Google+ Reveals Shutdown Timeline For Consumers (androidpolice.com) 31

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police: Google announced its plans to sunset its Google+ social media network for consumers on a sour note in October. The platform, which has a small but dedicated user-base, decided to shut down following Google's acknowledgement of a data exposure that affected up to 500,000 Google+ profiles. Shortly after, in December, the shutdown timeline was expedited due to another, larger bug that had the potential to reveal private user information and impacted approximately 52.5 million users. Now, the company has detailed its shutdown timeline for the consumer version of Google+ -- and it's not wasting any time.

The shutdown timeline is as follows:
- As early as February 4th, you will no longer be able to create new Google+ profiles, pages, communities, or events.
- The Google+ feature for website comments will be removed by Blogger by February 4th and other sites by March 7th. All Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2nd.
- Google+ sign-in buttons will stop working in the coming weeks, but in some cases will be replaced by a Google sign-in button.
- Google+ Community owners and moderators who are downloading data from their Community will gain additional data for download starting early March 2019. That includes author, body, and photos for every community post in a public community.
-On April 2nd, all Google+ accounts and pages will be shut down and Google will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in users' Album Archive and Google+ pages will also be deleted. Photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.

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Google+ Reveals Shutdown Timeline For Consumers

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  • Argh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:39PM (#58048086)

    So hidden in that note is a comment that Google+ will apparently be continuing for G Suite customers - and "new features are coming".

    I was really hoping that Google+ was really going away and that we could get our department's YouTube channel disconnected from the damn Google+ account we were basically coerced by Google into creating in the first place. But no... we're apparently stuck with this pointless account which almost no one actually wants. AND we've seen just how much attention Google pays to Google+ security!

    Thanks Google!

    • by nadass ( 3963991 )
      It's meant to be their "Slack" or "Teams" (formerly Yammer) competitor within the enterprise G Suite platform. I don't believe Google has any other service that accomplishes this role.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Well, they killed Wave. That was actually pretty cool for its time.

    • Just like I don't like the pointless Youtube account I was forced to get. The blame is not Google+ so don't bash it, instead bash Google.

  • It is unbelievable how many people just don't realize what they lose when they depend on one particular company for their communication. I would have thought that the 100+ years of telephony service experience has taught the people that lesson, but no, they make the same mistake time and again. And it's not like there is no alternative - NNTP and IRC have been available for decades.
  • It's history (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @07:31PM (#58048488) Journal

    Google has a long, long history of starting services, letting them run for a while, and then killing them off. For example:

    Google Video
    Helpouts by Google
    SearchMash
    Google Reader
    Dodgeball
    Google Deskbar
    Google Answers
    Google Browser Sync
    Picasa Hello
    Google Lively
    Google Page Creator
    Google Catalogs
    Google Wave
    Google Nexus One
    Goog 411
    Google Health
    Google PowerMeter
    IGoogle
    Postini
    Google Gears
    Google Labs and hosts of related projects
    Google Bookmarks Lists
    Google Friend Connect
    Google Gears
    Google Search Timeline
    Knol
    Google Authorship
    Google Desktop
    Fast Flip
    Google Maps API for Flash
    Google Pack
    Google Web Security
    Image Labeler
    Notebook
    Orkut
    Sidewiki
    Subscribed Links
    Code Search
    Jaiku

    I'm sure there are others that aren't on the list.

    Keep in mind that many of these were created solely to harvest user data.

    Take GOOG-411 for example- the service was provided for free with no ads or any other revenue source because Google only wanted callers for their phonemes. The service was designed as a way to anonymously collect vocal samples from a large sample of North American callers in order to better train their speech recognition tools.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      You mentioned Picasa Hello so don't forget Picasa and Picasa Web Albums.
    • Re:It's history (Score:4, Interesting)

      by stoborrobots ( 577882 ) on Thursday January 31, 2019 @12:18AM (#58049244)

      https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]

      https://gcemetery.co/ [gcemetery.co]

      and https://didgoogleshutdown.com/ [didgoogleshutdown.com]

      are relevant

    • by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      So much this. Using services to capture data and dropping anything that doesn't have an acceptable userbase, regardless of how popular the platform is with any users, Google's modus operandi for services and always has been. If you're using a Google service with low market penetration start looking for alternatives, and once people are cracking jokes about "all <single digit number> users!" on forums such as this it's time to pull any data out and make the switch.

      Also, ROFL at certain online tech
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Google has the worst case of corporate ADD that I've ever seen. You should not use any Google products for "mission critical" applications.

    Those that do, need to have their heads examined.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    "decided to shut down following Google's acknowledgement of a data exposure that affected up to 500,000 Google+ profiles."

    This can't be the reason, mainly because this will be the recognition of its own incompetence. If Google is incompetent to maintain a product, why Google will sell services?

  • One more milestone they forgot to mention

    On April 1 it will be widely reported that Google has cancelled the shutdown of Google+ and is instead relaunching the service with features merged in from Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Inbox and Picasa.

  • by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @11:52PM (#58049184)

    All Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2nd.

    So if you commented on Slashdot using Google sign-in, does that mean you comments will be deleted or changed to AC comments?

  • G+ is shutting down?! OMG!! What am I going to do with my life now?
  • D*mn*d thing has been cluttering my old phone (along with a host of other Google cr*p that I never ever used) since I bought it. I could really use the space back.

    • Alas, that doesn't do much good when you do it on a rooted phone. On older Android versions the undeletable embedded version comes in the system partition, so deleting it doesn't provide you any usable storage space. On newer Android version the system-installed one is just a stub, so it already doesn't use much of that unusable space to begin with.

      The main advantages in removing those apps are their icons disappearing, and no background process of theirs starting to use your processor and battery.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    It would not have changed the failure of Google+, but please:

    Don't ever include a symbol as part of a consumer product name!

    How does (or did) someone get to Google+? www.googleplus.com, www.google+.com (is the + character even accetpable in a domain name?), www.google-plus.com, plus.google.com???

    I actually think Google+ would have been better for users than Facebook. But I now avoid all social networking websites as much as I possibly can. Kind of like how I avoid crack cocaine, opioids, cutting into mys

  • Of course, I did know that. I read Slashdot. But I haven't heard a single word from Google about it. Not an email, not a notification, nothing. If it were up to them, I'd have no idea. I bet a lot of G+ users still don't know it's shutting down. Can't Google bother to even tell its users when it's going to shut down a service they use?

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