Google Plus is Going Away…oh yeah, and was Hacked.
Remember Google Wave? Google Reader? Google Buzz? Picasa? No? Soon you won’t remember Google+ because Google is shutting it down, too.
Why is Google shutting Google+ down? In their own words, “[Google+] has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user interaction with apps.”
Yeah. We know. We knew five years ago!
Google is shutting Google+ down because almost no one used it. It was kind of like the Zune: it got enthusiastic support from a very small group of devoted followers, but most people wanted something else like Facebook. Additionally, Google discovered a bug in one of their APIs which could have been exploited to steal user data if there had been, you know, data to steal!
How Do I Download my Google+ Data?
Google is going to give you until 31 August 2019, a little more than ten whole months, to retrieve and secure your data. How do you do that? That’s a little trickier because Google says, “Over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data.” So there’s no official way, as of now, to download your Google+ data. Quite honestly, you may not even want that data.
You can download your data now using this app from Google called Takeout. Takeout lets you download almost all of your information from Google, so it’s a great tool to remember! If you don’t want to wait, you can try Takeout, otherwise, we suggest checking back here because we will provide step by step help once Google has decided how they want to handle getting your data. It’s also possible they aren’t going to give this much thought and may decide that Takeout is the official method. Quite frankly, were not even sure what you would do with your data once you have it.
So…Move Along?
First, you should ask yourself if the information on your Google+ account is worth downloading and saving. Did you mainly crosspost from Facebook and Twitter to Google+ (this is, by far, the most common case)? Then you probably want to move along and let Google+ occupy the same part of your brain that caused you to forget all those other services.
Second, if you’re maintaining a Google+ account for business purposes, you should know that Google already stopped supporting businesses and pushed Google My Business for local businesses who wanted an online presence within Google’s ecosystem. They have said that Google+ will further “focus on our enterprise efforts and will be launching new features purpose-built for businesses.”
In other words, Google is working on features to only benefit large corporations’ internal social networks and not local businesses.
If you’d like to read what Google wrote about their sunsetting of Google+, check out this link: Google Project Strobe