Google would have loved to see their social networking venture blossom and flourish like its rivals Facebook and Twitter but alas, it was not meant to be. After hinting at it for quite some time, the search engine giant has announced that it will shut down Google+ on April 2.
On the aforementioned date, Google will start removing all content on the Google+ platform, including photos, videos, pages and anything else on the site. If you have been one of the few ardent users of Google+ on this planet, you better start thinking about downloading all of your data before it’s too late.
Of course, there are companies that have been using Google+, and they will continue to do so after this development as well since Google is merely shutting down the consumer version. Additionally, all Google+ APIs will be vanquished as well on March 7.
Google+ has been a sore point for Google for most of its lifetime. Indeed, this farewell is hardly going to be a teary-eyed one; instead, there will be an immense relief for both tech giants and consumers who had to put up with its unimpressive performance and prevalent security flaws.
One such flaw was the bug that was allowing third-parties to access user data such as full names, email addresses, gender data and profile pictures since 2015 until Google finally got around to dealing with it in March 2018.
While this was certainly bad enough, the fact that Google decided not to inform the public about it was simply deplorable. Plus, it says a lot about the vulnerable stature of Google+ itself – it is already so bad that the idea of mentioning a bug in it was unthinkable for Google.
Therefore, Google’s social network has not only been more or less irrelevant when pitted against the likes of Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, but it has been a liability both for Google and its users. Deciding to ax it was not only inevitable, but it was also right.
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