Google+ Reveals Shutdown Timeline For Consumers (androidpolice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police: Google announced its plans to sunset its Google+ social media network for consumers on a sour note in October. The platform, which has a small but dedicated user-base, decided to shut down following Google's acknowledgement of a data exposure that affected up to 500,000 Google+ profiles. Shortly after, in December, the shutdown timeline was expedited due to another, larger bug that had the potential to reveal private user information and impacted approximately 52.5 million users. Now, the company has detailed its shutdown timeline for the consumer version of Google+ -- and it's not wasting any time.

The shutdown timeline is as follows:
- As early as February 4th, you will no longer be able to create new Google+ profiles, pages, communities, or events.
- The Google+ feature for website comments will be removed by Blogger by February 4th and other sites by March 7th. All Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2nd.
- Google+ sign-in buttons will stop working in the coming weeks, but in some cases will be replaced by a Google sign-in button.
- Google+ Community owners and moderators who are downloading data from their Community will gain additional data for download starting early March 2019. That includes author, body, and photos for every community post in a public community.
-On April 2nd, all Google+ accounts and pages will be shut down and Google will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in users' Album Archive and Google+ pages will also be deleted. Photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.

Comments

Argh

[93 Escort Wagon]

So hidden in that note is a comment that Google+ will apparently be continuing for G Suite customers - and "new features are coming".

I was really hoping that Google+ was really going away and that we could get our department's YouTube channel disconnected from the damn Google+ account we were basically coerced by Google into creating in the first place. But no... we're apparently stuck with this pointless account which almost no one actually wants. AND we've seen just how much attention Google pays to Google+ security!

Thanks Google!

It's history

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Google has a long, long history of starting services, letting them run for a while, and then killing them off. For example:

Google Video
Helpouts by Google
SearchMash
Google Reader
Dodgeball
Google Deskbar
Google Answers
Google Browser Sync
Picasa Hello
Google Lively
Google Page Creator
Google Catalogs
Google Wave
Google Nexus One
Goog 411
Google Health
Google PowerMeter
IGoogle
Postini
Google Gears
Google Labs and hosts of related projects
Google Bookmarks Lists
Google Friend Connect
Google Gears
Google Search Timeline
Knol
Google Authorship
Google Desktop
Fast Flip
Google Maps API for Flash
Google Pack
Google Web Security
Image Labeler
Notebook
Orkut
Sidewiki
Subscribed Links
Code Search
Jaiku

I'm sure there are others that aren't on the list.

Keep in mind that many of these were created solely to harvest user data.

Take GOOG-411 for example- the service was provided for free with no ads or any other revenue source because Google only wanted callers for their phonemes. The service was designed as a way to anonymously collect vocal samples from a large sample of North American callers in order to better train their speech recognition tools.

Re:It's history

[stoborrobots]

https://killedbygoogle.com/

https://gcemetery.co/

and https://didgoogleshutdown.com/

are relevant

Re:It's history

[Zocalo]

So much this. Using services to capture data and dropping anything that doesn't have an acceptable userbase, regardless of how popular the platform is with any users, Google's modus operandi for services and always has been. If you're using a Google service with low market penetration start looking for alternatives, and once people are cracking jokes about "all users!" on forums such as this it's time to pull any data out and make the switch.

Also, ROFL at certain online tech trend commentators acting all butthurt because they bought into Google+ and got caught out by this - what part of "You are not the user, you are the *product*" haven't you grokked yet? Really inspiring confidence that they actually know what they're about there...

Effecting anything here?

[SeaFox]

All Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2nd.

So if you commented on Slashdot using Google sign-in, does that mean you comments will be deleted or changed to AC comments?