Technology giant Google has finally started shutting down Google+ and it is now deleting the accounts of all the consumers on its social media platform. This marks the end of Google’s attempt to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
Google has said that Google+ is being closed down due to “low usage” and also because it became a liability for the company to keep it secure. The technology giant revealed that Google+ suffered two data breaches that had the potential of exposing information of millions of users on the platform to outside developers.
It was the first data leak that made Google decide that it was time to close down Google+. When the second data breach happened, the search giant preponed the date for closing down the social media platform. So while Google+ earlier had to be shut down by August, it will now close down by April.
In the case of both the data leaks, Google has clarified that there is no evidence of developers being aware of the bugs, let alone them taking an advantage of them. According to Google’s timeline for the shutdown for Google+, the APIs for the social media platform have already been cut off.
Speaking further about the platform, Google’s Ben Smith said in October last year, “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. 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”
We should add here that during the first few years of Google+, the search giant forced its users to create an account on the platform in order to comment on its other services. For instance, user could not comment on YouTube videos without having a Google+ account. Needless to say, the move drew criticism from many. Furthermore, Google also tied the process of creating a Gmail account to being on Google+. However, being forced into the platform did not work well with most users, so they couldn’t really get themselves to appreciate Google+ features that were not present on other social media platforms.
The features that made Google+ stand out included Circles, which let users organise people into different categories like Friends, Work, Family and more, so they could decide what to share with which Circle. Other than this, it was a platform where people could have conversations based on a topic, something that is not present on Facebook. In spite of all this, Google+ never managed to become a hit among the masses.
Google has already said that it will take it a few months to delete all personal Google+ accounts, so don’t be surprised if you come across pages from the website even after today. However, the content deletion has already started.
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