Last week, Google Plus—Google’s social network project—was shut down for good. Google Plus (Google+) began with promise and saw rapid success at the beginning of its use. However, over time, the social networking platform went from 500 million active users to a number that cannot compete in the online social space. This year, 90% of Google Plus user sessions were less than five seconds.
In 2014, Google decided to place Google Plus “on the back burner” to focus on other initiatives. Unfortunately, this caused a decrease in resources and employees available for updating and growing the platform. From there, Google chose to remove Hangouts, Google Photos and Google Plus stream from the platform, making them their own entities. Suddenly, three of the most important pieces of Google Plus were no more a part of the package.
More changes occurred, such as the removal of Events and YouTube integration. Then bots and spam seemed to take over the platform. In March of this year, Google discovered a leak of private data from 500,000 users tied to Google Plus. This final blow has Google shutting down Plus for good over a ten-month period that ends in August 2019. Businesses and individuals have until then to find another form of social media to use if they haven’t done so already.
Source: Innotech Today
