The end of Google+ is coming sooner than we thought.
In the race to the social media cemetery, Google+ beat Twitter to the finish line. Twitter has recently been on the decline in comparison to Facebook and Instagram, but Google+ is the one coming to an abrupt halt.
The decision to shut down Google+ was supposedly based on a security breach that exposed private profile data. However, many people wonder if Google used that as an excuse for something they already intended to do.
“The data that was exposed was relatively benign — including names, emails and occupations, but not phone numbers or personal messages.”
Many users did not feel personally violated.
One of the preexisting reasons for its demise were the low number of users in comparison to other social media platforms. In 2011, when Google+ launched, it was the fastest growing social network. However, there were only 170 million users, compared to 900 million Facebook users. Only four years later, in 2015, a contributor for Forbes wrote an article called “Five Reasons Why Google Plus Died”. It appears as if this was a long time coming.
However, there is still a Google+ community, and they’re not happy. Nearly 40,000 people signed a petition against Google’s decision on Change.org.
Many petition supporters mention that the platform was a great place to share ideas and make friends. They also report being unaffected by the security breach. According to one user,
“The best thing about Google+ is that unlike Facebook or Instagram, it’s quiet. Thus it’s easy to get into meaningful conversations on the topics we like with our circle of like-minded friends.”
The official end of Google+ is coming in early April. They planned to do away with the platform over a much longer period of time. In October 2018, Google announced that we could expect the end in August.
To ease the transition, Google launched a service called Takeout, which was intended to simplify data exporting:
Now, there isn’t much time left to utilize this service to save your data. Any pages, photos, and videos stored in your Google+ archive will be deleted. However, content in Google Photos isn’t going anywhere.
Businesses should start taking steps to cut ties with the platform. Removing all Google+ related links from your website and other social media platforms is easy.
Selecting the appropriate platform to relocate your content is a little bit trickier.
WebTalk, which is in its beta stage, and MeWe are among the suggested alternatives. Depending on the nature your content, however, it might be best to make the move to Facebook or LinkedIn. There are already a high number of users on the two platforms, so at the very least, they’re a good place to communicate your content changes following the death of Google+.
