It has been deemed as one of the most obscure social media sites out there, and whilst it has remained online for over seven years, it was announced yesterday that Google+ will close its doors in August 2019.
In a frank blog post released by Google yesterday, it was stated that despite a great deal of effort put into developing the platform over the years, it had failed to attract consumer adoption as its rivals had. Interaction on the site was so low in fact that research found that 90% of sessions on Google+ lasted a meagre five seconds.
Following an in-depth look into the safety and security during a review named Project Strobe, a bug was discovered in Google+ which left some user data vulnerable to attack. This data was limited to Google+ profile fields such as email, occupation, age, etc, and did not include any other data that may have been posted within another Google products (i.e. messages, account data, posts, etc).
Google were quick to reassure users that the bug was patched within two weeks of its discovery and has since not found any evidence that data had been abused. What was highlighted, however, is that with the challenges that maintaining this scarcely used platform presented, it was no longer viable to continue to support the network, and the decision was made to gradually ‘sunset’ the social networking site, with complete closure scheduled for next August.
Information will be released in the coming months for users wanting to migrate or download their data from Google+ before it is closed. You can find out more about the closure and Project Strobe on Google’s blog.
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