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Before Google+ Shuts Down, The Internet Archive Will Preserve Its Posts (theverge.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the memory-holes dept.

Google+ "was an Internet-based social network. It was almost 8 years old," reports KilledByGoogle.com, which bills itself as "The Google Graveyard: A list of dead products Google has killed and laid to rest in the Google Cemetery."

But before Google+ closes for good in April, its posts are being preserved by Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam, reports the Verge: In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won't be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted... They also note that they won't be able to capture everything: comment threads have a limit of 500 comments, "but only presents a subset of these as static HTML. It's not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved." They also say that images and video won't be preserved at full resolution...

They also urge people who don't want their content to be archived to delete their accounts, and pointed to a procedure to request the removal of specific content.
A bit of history: Linus Torvalds launched a Google+ page in 2017 called "Gadget Reviews" -- where he made exactly six posts.

30 comments

  1. Why bother? by Clit+++Boner · · Score: -1

    Nobody cares!

    1. Re:Why bother? by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think that decades from now, or maybe even further down the road, historians will start to take a large amount of interest in stuff like this. Not because there's anything particularly important in those posts, but instead to get an idea of what people were like and how their concerns were similar or different to present times, in much the same way we look at old letters from dozens or even hundreds of years ago.

      One of my favorite courses in college was actually a history class that involved nothing of dates, important people, or memorable events. Instead it focused entirely on the common people and how they lived and went about their lives. It gave me a much greater appreciation for history and is something that really stuck with me. The humanities usually get a hard time from the STEM side, but when they're well taught I believe that they're as valuable educationally as any of the other courses that I took.

    2. Re: Why bother? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sadly, Google will probably keep the brand and elaborately skin the 400 error page you will undoubtedly get for years if you accidentally try to go to the Google+ home page.

    3. Re:Why bother? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      Fuck historians.

    4. Re:Why bother? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Linus Torvald's g+ page was something I used to follow periodically. But I can't remember ever getting into a google+ page because a google search pointed a interesting result to it. I wonder how big portion of g+ traffic was going to Linus' page alone.

    5. Re: Why bother? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      âoeStudy the past, if you would define the futureâ - Confucius

  2. Kendall was a boring social network parasite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    It was almost 8 years old when it realized it didn't matter, not for a damn, not at all. Never even a bit.

  3. ALL of the posts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Both of them?

    1. Re:ALL of the posts? by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      I posted more than that :-) I'm going to save some of the stuff, there were links to a lot of things I posted that wouldn't make it on Facebook for being too nerdy. Some things you post to family and old high school friends, and some things you post to current friends, and they don't often overlap.

    2. Re: ALL of the posts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It did seem it wasn't used much, but it had the tech support forums for a few projects I was interested in. Can't say I'm too sad to see it go. I found the UI to be horrendously bad.

  4. Will miss Google+ by makitso · · Score: 2

    Kind of sad. It was an easy place to see all the technical communities. Now they're scattered.

    1. Re:Will miss Google+ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I won't mourn the loss of any centralized platforms because the platforms they themselves killed were far more interesting.

      Google killed usenet using a two-prong approach. Kill dejanews to destroy the past, then flood it with garbage "groups" to destroy the present.

    2. Re:Will miss Google+ by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      It was an easy way for Google to see what all the technical communities were doing.

      People need to get this aspect of Google into their heads, and keep it there.

      Google sees everything anyone on Google does. Whether it's Docs, or +, or gmail.

      And they can flag it for anything they happen to be looking for that particular week.

      I used Google+ reluctantly and infrequently, I don't use Docs, and I do not use gmail for important business. It's my "junk drawer" of email accounts.

    3. Re:Will miss Google+ by daver!west!fmc · · Score: 1

      Google sees everything anyone on Google does. Whether it's Docs, or +, or gmail.

      Or netnews. Just because the webby Google "Usenet" archive is crap doesn't mean their interfaces aren't. Or elsewhere on the web. I am wondering how much of the web is intentionally "dark" in that it prevents Google's crawler(s) from fetching the pages.

    4. Re:Will miss Google+ by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      All it is, is sign of how incompetent Google is in reality. Search wars, was a competition of who was the worst at providing it and not who was the best, Google won by being the least worst but there in after got progressively worse, more invasive and more false search results and more advertising. There were reasonable social media players out there and Google could not simply win the battle of who was the worst.

      Competition is heating up again and those who could win, who was the worst, of course straight out lose in the real competition of who is the best. Google, well, - (minus), lost that and lost it handily, they were worse than facebook and that took real effort.

      Now google is jumping into gaming, wait, they lost at gaming once before, dropped it, did it so badly people forget they were already in that market and failed abysmally. Now they pretend they can succeed in a highly competitive market, sure the triple 'AAA' (arrogant anal arseholes) publishers are choking the chicken and totally vulnerable to major losses but the better game makers, the independent developers are entirely more competition than google can hope to tackle, especially with their always in beta SJW developers, more concerned with invading privacy, manipulating searches and controlling their users or is that the used.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  5. There you go by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

    Even Linus couldn’t really warm up to Google+...

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  6. Quick! by apoc.famine · · Score: 3, Funny

    Quick everyone! Fire up your old accounts and post all the porn you saved from Tumblr. Lets make sure it doesn't get lost forever.

    --
    Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
  7. On a 2GB thumb drive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And it will still have room for their 1.9GB porn collection

    1. Re: On a 2GB thumb drive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. Because even though it's sold as a 2GB it only has 1.9GB. It's what all storage calcs are based in not 2GB.

  8. Archive garbage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Watch it rot. Eventually it will be unreadable, like Google's archive of Usenet.

    1. Re: Archive garbage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Which interesting enough is not mentioned on the KilledByGoogle site.

  9. Archive.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Instead of urging users to delete their accounts to prevent backup this archiving should be opt in vs opt out. I understand that would make what they are doing more difficult but that's the way it should be.

    1. Re:Archive.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's OK, just modify the robots.txt on the defunct domain and archive.org will delete it all. It is the perfect archive. Of nothing.

    2. Re: Archive.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They don't do that with robots.txt anymore.

    3. Re:Archive.org by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      Who cares? they will still have to comply if you ask them to delete your stuff and info about you.

      It's not like that's optional for google to comply with, so there can't be a deadline like that.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  10. Archive.org, among the best of the internet. by ikhider · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Unlike mainstream social media and Google, Archive.org (the PBS of the internet) is there for the user, touting Universal Access to Knowledge. Rather than being driven by ad revenue, Archive.org is there to serve the best interests of the public. Ideally, non-profits, such as museums like The Smithsonian (and the public) are better served to have an Archive.org page of videos instead of on Youtube. Watch 'Google: Behind the Screen (2006)', especially the segments where Archve.org founder Brewster Kahle talk's about our reliance on 'Google searches' (instead of multi-source searches) diminished our capacity to acquire knowledge. It remains to be seen whether Google will order a take down of Google + instances like certain lawyers are of 'Wayback Machine' pages.

    --
    "SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
  11. bullshit by MadMaverick9 · · Score: 3, Funny

    view-source:https://killedbygoogle.com/

    <body>
        <div id="killedbygoogle"></div>
        <script src="main.js"></script>
    </body>

  12. It's too bad.... by lord_mike · · Score: 1

    ...that they can't go back in time and archive all the Compuserve content from way back. Compuserve was the first worldwide BBS, a forerunner to the consumer internet. It's "home" was DEC server in Columbus, Ohio. Since many companies and individuals used Compuserve as they do the web today, when the service disappeared, a ton of useful data was lost. Although nothing like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, it still was a great loss of history.

  13. Speaking of the past Google Plus Accounts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I hope they don't forget the 3.4 million URLS from 2017 left in 50,000 sitmap.xmls files randomly left ~2 years ago... It's always a riot to pick one and see if that person made ANY posts.. ever.

  14. Why are we dissing IA? by hanju · · Score: 0

    The constraints on the preservation must be either real (Google's fault), legal (Google's fault, or privacy), or Google's decision (Google's fault) Reasoning: I'm guessing it's cheaper and easier for Google to provide IA with the data directly from the backend rather than scrape.