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Opinion: Goodbye, Google Plus, we hardly knew you

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Google Plus, by all accounts, was never the Facebook killer some opined it would become upon launch in 2011.

About seven years later, Google has announced the planned closure of the social media network for consumers next year.

For a social network that swiftly drifted out of the public zeitgeist, this is hardly surprising news. “Add me on Facebook” is still a common phrase. I’d wager no one has asked you to join them on Google Plus recently – maybe ever.

The platform never fully caught on, as it simply was not up to par with Facebook. The features were barren and, at least in my case, hardly any of my friends flocked over from Facebook.

That’s not to say it didn’t have some neat ideas.

It’s user groups, dubbed Circles, were meant to allow only certain groups of people designated by the user to view posts. There’s validity to this idea, which is similar in some aspects to Facebook Groups and private messages. Similarly, posts did not become public by default, something that’s a setting on Facebook. Media reports in general have rated the privacy settings better for Google Plus, aka Google+.

Other features, such as Hangouts, Google Photos and check-ins, either have been rolled out as their own standalone products or also are available on Facebook.

Simply put, there wasn’t much that was captivating about Google Plus. There’s certainly room in the market for Facebook competitors, but this just wasn’t the one.

Perhaps ironically, going back to privacy settings, the ultimate downfall of Google Plus was related to a potential data breach.

Ben Smith, Google fellow and vice president of engineering, in an Oct. 8 blog post disclosed third-party apps previously had the ability to gain information from up to 500,000 Google Plus accounts via a bug related to application programming interfaces, the tools and resources that enable developers to create software.

“We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any profile data was misused,” Smith wrote. “The review did highlight the significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets consumers’ expectations. Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+.”

The usage trends he’s referring to here are revealingly terrible. The blog post indicates 90 percent of Google Plus’ user sessions last less than five seconds. Even on the internet, five seconds isn’t enough time to do much – indicating some of those clicks were accidental. Ouch.

Figures compiled by blogger Dustin Stout for Dustn.tv estimate Google Plus had around 395 million monthly active users out of 2 billion registered users in early 2018. That’s way below the 2.2 billion monthly active users recorded by No. 1 social media network Facebook. On the list, Google’s YouTube ranked second with 1.5 billion monthly active users. Google Plus is flanked by Facebook’s WhatsApp, at 700 million monthly active users, and Twitter, at 330 million.

While Google Plus’ numbers are staggeringly low compared with Facebook, that’s still a hefty figure.

Lucky for business users – dubbed enterprise customers by Google – the platform isn’t going away.

“Our review showed that Google+ is better suited as an enterprise product where co-workers can engage in internal discussions on a secure corporate social network. Enterprise customers can set common access rules, and use central controls, for their entire organization,” Google’s Smith wrote. “We’ve decided to focus on our enterprise efforts and will be launching new features purpose-built for businesses.”

For everyone else, the consumer side of Google Plus is scheduled to wind down fully by the end of August 2019. That’s plenty of time to wrap up any social networking you may want to accomplish or transfer data.

Chances are, though, you don’t have that need.

Springfield Business Journal Web Producer Geoff Pickle can be reached at gpickle@sbj.net.

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