Thu. Mar 28th, 2024
Google+ANKARA, TURKEY - OCTOBER 9: Screen of a smart phone show Google Plus and Facebook logos in Ankara, Turkey on October 9, 2018. (Photo by Aytac Unal/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Google has officially started shutting down and deleting consumer accounts on its Google+ social network platform, marking the end of the company’s attempt to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. “The shutdown is underway as of this morning,” a Google spokesperson confirmed to The Verge.

The primary reason for Google to pull the plug on its ambitious social media site could be attributed to its low usage as well as it turning into something of a security liability for Google. The company declared two data leaks that could have potentially exposed tens of millions of accounts to outside developers. The two vulnerabilities discovered have resulted in the shutting down of Google+; the first liability found, which was not disclosed by the company for months, prompted Google to shut down its social media platform for good, while the second liability found accelerated those shutdown plans by four months. Google had planned to shut down Google+ in August, however, the service will now meet its end in April itself.

In both the cases of vulnerability, Google said that there is no evidence that proves that developers were aware of the spillage and took advantage of it. Google+ APIs access has already been cut according to the company’s timeline for the shutdown.

Google has admitted that Google+ failed to stand up to the company’s expectations for users growth and popularity. “While our engineering teams have put a lot of effort and dedication into building Google+ over the years, it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption and has seen limited user interaction with apps,” Google’s Ben Smith wrote in October. He then went on to reveal quite an arduous status of Google+ as a social media platform: “90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”

Although Google+ failed to stand up against social media giants like Facebook, it managed to become a home for a small-but-loyal community of users through the years. Google+ often saw users engaging in off-topic discussions, which helped conversations feel more natural and constructive rather than the squabbling that is often found on social media platforms.

In the early days of Google+, Google asked its users, to their dismay, to create an account on the social network in order to comment on the company’s other services such as YouTube. Google+ even got tied with the process of creating a Gmail account. The various attempts from Google to implement its social media platform in the life of its users did not go well and somewhere Google managed to damage its own reputation through its futile attempts at force-feeding an incompetent social media platform.

The company says that the process of deleting all the users’ account “will take a few months,” and there are chances that during the interim a few pages are left standing. But content deletion — including photos and videos in your Google+ album archive — starts now.

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