23 ms·

Google will shut down Google+ four months early after second data leak

261 points by bhauer 8y ago

cosmotron 8y ago
From Google: https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expediting-changes-google-plus/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expeditin...
Cheyana 8y ago
It amazes me that a company with all the resources that Google has repeatedly coming up with ideas and doing absolutely nothing effective with them. They've had some winners, like Chrome, and their acquisition of Youtube eventually paid off, but something as simple as a social media site and the best they can come up with from scratch is Google+.
- keerthiko 8y ago
  > as simple as a social media site um "simple"? walks off cackling maniacally into the sunset
- SllX 8y ago
  As I understand it, Google is not well optimized for putting out new mass market customer-facing services and keeping them going. Their entire organizational hierarchy actually runs counter to this very idea, and you know, people at Google are just like people everywhere else. That is to say, they are just people. The fact that every now and then they have a success speaks better of the specific team driving it than it does of Google as a whole organization. That is usually the case with any corporation though. So basically, you can have all the resources in the world, but if you’re not organized well, then you will not accomplish your goals more efficiently than your smaller competitors. The fact that your competitors are comparatively resource starved probably helps them optimize better than you can, because what is just a side project to you is their entire existence to them.
  - O1111OOO 8y ago
    > As I understand it, Google is not well optimized for putting out new mass market customer-facing services and keeping them going. I've been reading the threads about Google killing off products - to the point where it's become a meme. Lost in this are the number of products killed off by other large tech firms. A shame because sometimes objectivity is lost in the analysis. Your phrasing got me thinking about some of Google's successes (off the top of my head): They have old successes in search and gmail. In these cases, they climbed their way to the top. The have google.docs, youtube (oldish) but entering TV/Movies now, android (not that old), Chrome Browser, ChromeOS & their entry into schools, translate, google.storage, maps, that dohickey used to stream video to TV sets (can't remember the name:)... Google Plus probably deserves a quick death. I just wouldn't underestimate Google by downplaying their successes.
    - cobookman 8y ago
      Youtube - Aquisition Android - Aquisition Maps - Aquisition Docs - Aquisition Google is great at scaling up aquisitions and optimizing them for the audience.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - skybrian 8y ago
        Survivorship bias here. There are lots of other Google acquisitions that sank without a trace. It seems the hit rate is low whether inside or outside Google.
        MR4D 8y ago
        The hit rate isn't as important as how well the hits perform. The list above has done quite well, and I highly doubt that Google has spent as much on the losers as the winners have made for them. If so, Google would be out of business (or close to it).
      - 8y ago
- skybrian 8y ago
  I don't know what you mean? The G+ UI is pretty good, certainly a lot better than Facebook was at the time when G+ launched. For a while, a lot of people were happy there, particularly in certain niches like photography. It's a shame the implementation was so complex (apparently) that now it can't be easily maintained. This does seem to happen to Google a lot. It probably has more to do with too many resources, rather than not enough. But maybe it's not simple to compete with Facebook. Maybe this has little to do with technology.
  - Daniel_sk 8y ago
    I don't know, but the whole Circles things was overcomplicated and average users didn't bother to put their followers into different circles, I am not sure how they thought this would work.
    - skybrian 8y ago
      Well, that's true. But being able to follow people (like on Twitter, not like friending on Facebook) is nice. As is not having character limits.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      Circles was fantastic, and continues to be what I wish for in a lot of other networks. Mainly because there are people I follow loosely (don't mind seeing the occasional update from), and people I follow religiously (because I know them personally or care about every single thing they say). I used to maintain really primarily two feeds. One I cared to always read all the time, and one I'd browse when I was bored. G+ mostly mitigated the frustration of it for people who didn't care years ago: You can just click follow and it puts them in a default following circle.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        Circles is great for geeks who like to have such fine-grained control over their lives, both online and offline. For the rest of the world it doesn't really matter, and even if it does it is too difficult to set up and maintain. A company called Hyves in the Netherlands did much the same thing (but with a fairly crappy UI) long before Google+ came along. That fell to FB as well.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  I've never worked at Google, but some of the commentary I've seen from people who have worked there suggests that performance reviews and promotions (at the senior levels) are heavily gated on your roles in releasing new products to users, with maintenance of existing products factoring in very little, if at all.
  - coffeedrinker 8y ago
    They should modify it so after launch it is based on active users. That will keep good things growing.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Well, Apple failed with Ping, so I sometimes think that social media is a lot harder than any of us think.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  According to my taste and requirements Google+ is (or was before they started adding unnecessary complexity to its model) by far the best social network I've ever seen. In fact "It amazes me that a company with all the resources that Google has repeatedly…" behaved like "the president of Madagascar" shutting down everything...[1] [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything
- chubot 8y ago
  something as simple as a social media site Ironically, this is exactly the attitude that led Google to fail in social media! Why do you think it's simple? Because you think it's technologically simple?
- wmeredith 8y ago
  Old Chinese proverb: He who chases two rabbits catches none.
- toyg 8y ago
  G+ wasn't that bad, technically speaking. They just failed at managing the political aspects of it, focusing too brutally on their own requirements, to the detriment of users' own: "we want your real names, so we can be the authority of record for everything! And we won't let you hack anything of importance on top of the platform, because we want our content clean!"... Compare with the free-for-all hacking bonanza that early twitter was, or the spam machine that Facebook is - social networks are powered by oversharing, an activity that G+ actively resisted in many different ways. But technically speaking, they had the best support for high-quality photos, good features for private groups, and a few other wins on features like Hangouts.
  - wyclif 8y ago
    RealNameGate was the tipping point from OK to bad IMHO. When they forced the issue, they lost a lot of goodwill. They should have done something similar to the optimal implementation of Twitter verified, merely to authenticate identity if the user desires (without bungling it as badly as Twitter has done).
    - jiveturkey 8y ago
      doesn’t facebook require real name? that was g+ competition, and everything was referenced to that.
      - toyg 8y ago
        Not really. I think it was policy back when it was for colleges, when they exploded they basically renounced it because it was a hassle to check. Most people simply kept doing it, because if your friends use their name why should you hide?
fotbr 8y ago
I haven't followed the Google+ saga, so forgive me if this has already been answered: Does the shutdown of Google+ mean that Google Search users will get the + operator back?
- pas 8y ago
  put the term(s) in double quotes, it does the same thing, no?
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    No.
    - pasbesoin 8y ago
      I don't have the time and attention to reproduce the details now, but I want to say that the parent is not a glib answer. There are significant differences, where double quotes do not reproduce the plus operator's behavior and fall significantly short in terms of facility in controlling search results. More than one author has described this better than I can, in articles, blog posts, and comments. (If you can "find" them -- heh; but of an unexpected joke come up as I type this.)
      - pasbesoin 8y ago
        I'm not finding the pages I remember -- a bit ironic, and I checked DuckDuckGo to see whether that might change any... bias. But, here are a couple of starting points: -- "6 common misconceptions when doing advanced Google Searching" http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2015/10/6-common-misconceptions-when-doing.html http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2015/10/6-comm... (Blogger "Javascript era/template workaround): https://archive.is/7t28O https://archive.is/7t28O I wasn't aware of some of the tips described there, but still not parity. -- The + operator has been replaced. (google.com) 261 points by hammock on Oct 21, 2011 | hide | past | web | favorite | 167 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3140797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3140797
jdp23 8y ago
Yikes. A release in November introduced an API bug that was active for about 6 days, impacting 52.5 million users. * With respect to this API, apps that requested permission to view profile information that a user had added to their Google+ profile—like their name, email address, occupation, age (full list here)—were granted permission to view profile information about that user even when set to not-public. * In addition, apps with access to a user's Google+ profile data also had access to the profile data that had been shared with the consenting user by another Google+ user but that was not shared publicly.
- morley 8y ago
  FWIW, also from the blog post: > We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.
  - foepys 8y ago
    Weren't they also saying somewhere that they are only keeping the logs from the last 3 months or so? So saying "we don't have evidence" might be true, but means nothing compared to the 6 year span the bug was present.
    - foota 8y ago
      6 days, not years.
  - theWheez 8y ago
    That doesn't get as many clicks!
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      It still indicates a fairly massive failure in terms of process. If you have the tools to discover this in an automated fashion but those tools are not part of your release process so you find out about them in production a week later then something is quite borked. If Google Drive had a failure like this it would be a lot worse than Google+. And that's a much more complex environment.
ccnafr 8y ago
Actual announcement: https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expediting-changes-google-plus/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expeditin...
mc32 8y ago
I really don't care what they do with the consumer version (who uses it?), but I'd like to see mapping and wayfinding features added to the paid GSuite version.
FreeInFlorida 8y ago
Wait... Google+ had 52 million users? That should be the headline.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Everyone with a gmail address or youtube account was strong armed into having a google+ account, which counts as their "userbase" regardless of whether or not any of those people actually made use of any google+ specific features.
  - hdpq 8y ago
    then it should be more than 52,000,000 people.
    - what_ever 8y ago
      The vulnerability did not affect all of the users.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  I personally had some dozens thousands followers from all over the Earth on Google+, communicated to them actively through commenting and have occasionally met some of them offline when they traveled to my country.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  There are over 3.3 billion G+ profiles, based on the March 2017 sitemaps files, though how many of those profiles are active is something of an open question. About 9% of Google+ accounts ever posted any public data. That's roughly 300 million profiles there, though for many of them, the posting was at best minimal. Based on publicly-visible posting activity, I and Stone Temple Consulting independently determined that there were ~4 - 16 million profiles publishing on a monthly basis or better in 1Q2015. Given other forms of participation, it's reasonable to assume a ~10x larger general active, but lurking, population, which gets us to about 40 - 160 million users. Various other forms of population estimation come up with fairly similar statistics. Keep in mind that until 2007, an online community with >10m users was extraordinary of itself. A few were larger (Google's own Blogger had 200m MUA in 2008, larger than Facebook at the time: https://techcrunch.com/2008/12/31/top-social-media-sites-of-2008-facebook-still-rising/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/12/31/top-social-media-sites-of-...). The most interesting thing about the 52 million user statistic reported is that it is in the general ballpark of at least one set of estimates of G+ user counts. A number on which Google have been showing remarkably more candor as of late, though far from crystal clarity.
shemnon42 8y ago
So is this four months per new leak found or "half the distance to the goal line?"
qwerty456127 8y ago
What are some good alternatives to Google+? I mean microblogs with subscribers/followers instead of friends, without a strict message length limit, with first-class comments, letting you to edit your posts and comments after you submit them and to limit access to particular post to a specific group of people?
- r721 8y ago
  Dreamwidth (Livejournal fork)? A recent Wired article: https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-bloggers-dreamwidth-pillowfort/ https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-bloggers-dreamwidth-...
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  There's a range of options, though what exactly depends on your goals and communities. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Platforms_and_Sites https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Platforms_and_Sit...
qwerty456127 8y ago
How do I download all the discussions (posts with comments) I have participated in?
- mikewhy 8y ago
  Google Takeout has two different Google+ entries that may have what you're looking for.
jcoffland 8y ago
Does anyone know how or if this will affect OAuth2 logins? Several of the sites I run rely on Google OAuth2 and get the user's avatar using Google APIs. It's a simple thing that does not require Google+ but it's unclear to me how it will be affected. What is this the 3rd or 4th social network Google has failed at?
- humanbeinc 8y ago
  I second that... basically all tutorials out there make use of the google+ api to log in.. would be a huge fallout all over the web ^^
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  This is why I gave up on oauth. In theory it's nice have somebody else manage your user accounts, but even facebook, which is not in imminent risk of a shutdown changes its API response periodically.
- toyg 8y ago
  It won't be affected. Google spent the last few years decoupling every useful G+ feature into standalone services, the account feature to me looks completely separate nowadays. Besides, without the OAuth provider, tons of integrations (that Google actively want on their products) would break. G+ was such a silly play, when you consider that Google already had the key to centralized identity all along: the ubiquitous GMail account. They will continue to push that for sure.
jacquesm 8y ago
So, how does Google, which we all trust with our precious data end up messing up like this several times in a row? If this is the company with the best security team in the world does that mean we should simply abandon all hope?
- coliveira 8y ago
  My opinion is that, given the infrastructure and practices we have, anything that is in digital form will be eventually hacked in one way or another. It is just a matter of time. Unfortunately the best security team can't do anything about it.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    It's depressing.
    - conanbatt 8y ago
      Its liberating. There is no information immortality.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        Hacked data is more, not less immortal.
        conanbatt 8y ago
        Let me rephrase that: there is no information privilege immortality.
  - eridius 8y ago
    The appropriate defense against this is to simply not collect any information that’s not necessary for the product, and any information you do collect, immediately anonymize (ideally client-side) and never keep the original data. Unfortunately, Google (and Facebook) has a business model that depends on acquiring as much personal data as possible and keeping it forever.
garysahota93 8y ago
They could have done soo much more with Google+ ... The hype was real up until launch. Really wish they had done things a little differently. Oh well... With all these leaks, I'm actually really glad they weren't successful with this.
- toyg 8y ago
  Even after launch. But the Real Names policy and lack of write api killed any momentum.
nullsmack 8y ago
Can we have Google Reader back now?
- hdpq 8y ago
  this is what i was looking for when i saw this headline.
DSingularity 8y ago
Data really has become radioactive.
- dana321 8y ago
  That is so true. Its like most of us live behind this wall of our behavior online, like it isn't shared unless there is a hack. But its sold, shared and traded without us knowing it, and used to display a reality tailored to us with the unintended consequence of us living in a bubble and not seeing much outside the edge of the bubble. This site is a great example of bubble breaking.
pmarreck 8y ago
Did they ever unfuck the merging of Google+ comments with YouTube comments?
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Mostly.
newman314 8y ago
I suppose I’ll ask this here. Does anyone know of a good way to archive a Google+ group. There is a bunch of good info about hacking the Kankun smart plug that I would like to preserve.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  No. There are some tools. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Data_Migration_Process_and_Considerations#Third_Party_Tools https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Data_Migration_Pr...
harbie 8y ago
Is it accurate to call this a leak if no one actually took advantage of the vulnerability?
svat 8y ago
There's a lot of great content on Google+. Is anyone working on a script to archive some of it before it all goes away? Perhaps the fine folks at the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)? Specifically, I'm wondering if someone's working on a script that does the following: - Ideally for each post URL given, it would preserve the post, and the comments (including the first few ones, not just the last few ones that are shown by default). It would be nice if it also preserves the +1s (including who +1d them), but that's optional. - And given a user, it would do the above for each (public) post of the user, or (optionally) use your account to save (just for yourself) the posts that you can see. There were a lot of people posting great stuff on G+ and resulting in wonderful thoughtful conversations (especially a couple of years ago), it would be shame to lose all that permanently. (If someone doubts this: see e.g. (if you're interested in mathematics) the posts by https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27 https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27 https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0 https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0 https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999 https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999 etc, or https://plus.google.com/+DanPiponi https://plus.google.com/+DanPiponi for more CS-y stuff, or for more "general" stuff https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger etc -- and for all these people, especially in 2015-2016 or so.) Edit: You can download your own content using Google Takeout https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com. Just learnt of these other places where this question has been asked / is being asked: this G+ community (https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772 https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772) and this wiki (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page) -- if you have any answers those may be good places to post too :-)
- pmlnr 8y ago
  > Is anyone working on a script to archive some of it before it all goes away? Perhaps the fine folks at the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)? The archivist in me is screaming that yes, of course it should be archived. The web-old-timer in me just shakes his head that people never learn to keep a copy of their content on the actual free - as in freedom - web, on their own website. Let it be a mere text file, uploaded by ftp, or a WordPress, or anything, just do it. Nobody should expect others to archive it for them. (For more on the topic, see http://indieweb.org/why http://indieweb.org/why ). Back on topic: talk to https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page .
tptacek 8y ago
Again, this is poor reporting. It's newsworthy that Google+ found and disclosed a vulnerability in its own code, but there is no norm for reporting internally-discovered vulnerabilities and few companies reliably do it, especially in SAAS platforms where there's no end-user patching activity that needs to be motivated. There's a colorable argument that you don't even want this to be a norm, because of the incentive problems it creates: http://flaked.sockpuppet.org/2018/10/09/internal-disclosure-boring.html http://flaked.sockpuppet.org/2018/10/09/internal-disclosure-... Regardless: bear in mind that you haven't even heard about a fraction of the horrible vulnerabilities internal teams at tech companies have discovered over the years.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  As someone in the heart of trying to help people get off G+, what's particularly newsworthy is that after two full months (and two days) of radio silence on the Google+ sunset, the first substantive comment from Google is ... that the sunset has been advanced by four months. We'd be recommending people be starting their migrations by Feb - May, and now they've got to complete them by April. That's something of a PITA. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Exodus_Planning_and_Scheduling#Phases https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Exodus_Planning_a... There are 7.9 million Google+ Communities. Sure, 3.9 million of those are 1 (or fewer) users, but that leaves tens of thousands of 1,000 or more members. Even at only a few percent of those as active, that's a lot of communities and people involved. And Google+ has no effective community migration process. Source on communities: I counted them myself, well, via sampling: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9zx67d/google_communities_membership_analysis_preview/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9zx67d/google_com...
afniljl 8y ago
I admit I actually rather liked Google+, for certain communities it was really active and well suited. However now that Google is decoupled and free from G+ shackles, it has really room to take off and grow in new areas, which is exciting to see. eg G+ logins will now be returned to G or Gmail branding, probably dramatically increases consumer confidence and mindshare, and other stuff. Developer teams can be fully redeployed to other products etc. Building of "micro" communities within Maps, YouTube, etc will accelerate, and that's really where it should be, rather than forced to accede to G+ product area.

261 points by bhauer 8y ago

From Google: https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expediting-changes-google-plus/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expeditin...

Cheyana 8y ago

It amazes me that a company with all the resources that Google has repeatedly coming up with ideas and doing absolutely nothing effective with them. They've had some winners, like Chrome, and their acquisition of Youtube eventually paid off, but something as simple as a social media site and the best they can come up with from scratch is Google+.

keerthiko 8y ago
> as simple as a social media site um "simple"? walks off cackling maniacally into the sunset
SllX 8y ago
As I understand it, Google is not well optimized for putting out new mass market customer-facing services and keeping them going. Their entire organizational hierarchy actually runs counter to this very idea, and you know, people at Google are just like people everywhere else. That is to say, they are just people. The fact that every now and then they have a success speaks better of the specific team driving it than it does of Google as a whole organization. That is usually the case with any corporation though. So basically, you can have all the resources in the world, but if you’re not organized well, then you will not accomplish your goals more efficiently than your smaller competitors. The fact that your competitors are comparatively resource starved probably helps them optimize better than you can, because what is just a side project to you is their entire existence to them.
- O1111OOO 8y ago
  > As I understand it, Google is not well optimized for putting out new mass market customer-facing services and keeping them going. I've been reading the threads about Google killing off products - to the point where it's become a meme. Lost in this are the number of products killed off by other large tech firms. A shame because sometimes objectivity is lost in the analysis. Your phrasing got me thinking about some of Google's successes (off the top of my head): They have old successes in search and gmail. In these cases, they climbed their way to the top. The have google.docs, youtube (oldish) but entering TV/Movies now, android (not that old), Chrome Browser, ChromeOS & their entry into schools, translate, google.storage, maps, that dohickey used to stream video to TV sets (can't remember the name:)... Google Plus probably deserves a quick death. I just wouldn't underestimate Google by downplaying their successes.
  - cobookman 8y ago
    Youtube - Aquisition Android - Aquisition Maps - Aquisition Docs - Aquisition Google is great at scaling up aquisitions and optimizing them for the audience.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - skybrian 8y ago
      Survivorship bias here. There are lots of other Google acquisitions that sank without a trace. It seems the hit rate is low whether inside or outside Google.
      - MR4D 8y ago
        The hit rate isn't as important as how well the hits perform. The list above has done quite well, and I highly doubt that Google has spent as much on the losers as the winners have made for them. If so, Google would be out of business (or close to it).
    - 8y ago
skybrian 8y ago
I don't know what you mean? The G+ UI is pretty good, certainly a lot better than Facebook was at the time when G+ launched. For a while, a lot of people were happy there, particularly in certain niches like photography. It's a shame the implementation was so complex (apparently) that now it can't be easily maintained. This does seem to happen to Google a lot. It probably has more to do with too many resources, rather than not enough. But maybe it's not simple to compete with Facebook. Maybe this has little to do with technology.
- Daniel_sk 8y ago
  I don't know, but the whole Circles things was overcomplicated and average users didn't bother to put their followers into different circles, I am not sure how they thought this would work.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Well, that's true. But being able to follow people (like on Twitter, not like friending on Facebook) is nice. As is not having character limits.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Circles was fantastic, and continues to be what I wish for in a lot of other networks. Mainly because there are people I follow loosely (don't mind seeing the occasional update from), and people I follow religiously (because I know them personally or care about every single thing they say). I used to maintain really primarily two feeds. One I cared to always read all the time, and one I'd browse when I was bored. G+ mostly mitigated the frustration of it for people who didn't care years ago: You can just click follow and it puts them in a default following circle.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Circles is great for geeks who like to have such fine-grained control over their lives, both online and offline. For the rest of the world it doesn't really matter, and even if it does it is too difficult to set up and maintain. A company called Hyves in the Netherlands did much the same thing (but with a fairly crappy UI) long before Google+ came along. That fell to FB as well.
jcranmer 8y ago
I've never worked at Google, but some of the commentary I've seen from people who have worked there suggests that performance reviews and promotions (at the senior levels) are heavily gated on your roles in releasing new products to users, with maintenance of existing products factoring in very little, if at all.
- coffeedrinker 8y ago
  They should modify it so after launch it is based on active users. That will keep good things growing.
reaperducer 8y ago
Well, Apple failed with Ping, so I sometimes think that social media is a lot harder than any of us think.
qwerty456127 8y ago
According to my taste and requirements Google+ is (or was before they started adding unnecessary complexity to its model) by far the best social network I've ever seen. In fact "It amazes me that a company with all the resources that Google has repeatedly…" behaved like "the president of Madagascar" shutting down everything...[1] [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-down-everything
chubot 8y ago
something as simple as a social media site Ironically, this is exactly the attitude that led Google to fail in social media! Why do you think it's simple? Because you think it's technologically simple?
wmeredith 8y ago
Old Chinese proverb: He who chases two rabbits catches none.
toyg 8y ago
G+ wasn't that bad, technically speaking. They just failed at managing the political aspects of it, focusing too brutally on their own requirements, to the detriment of users' own: "we want your real names, so we can be the authority of record for everything! And we won't let you hack anything of importance on top of the platform, because we want our content clean!"... Compare with the free-for-all hacking bonanza that early twitter was, or the spam machine that Facebook is - social networks are powered by oversharing, an activity that G+ actively resisted in many different ways. But technically speaking, they had the best support for high-quality photos, good features for private groups, and a few other wins on features like Hangouts.
- wyclif 8y ago
  RealNameGate was the tipping point from OK to bad IMHO. When they forced the issue, they lost a lot of goodwill. They should have done something similar to the optimal implementation of Twitter verified, merely to authenticate identity if the user desires (without bungling it as badly as Twitter has done).
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    doesn’t facebook require real name? that was g+ competition, and everything was referenced to that.
    - toyg 8y ago
      Not really. I think it was policy back when it was for colleges, when they exploded they basically renounced it because it was a hassle to check. Most people simply kept doing it, because if your friends use their name why should you hide?

fotbr 8y ago

I haven't followed the Google+ saga, so forgive me if this has already been answered: Does the shutdown of Google+ mean that Google Search users will get the + operator back?

pas 8y ago
put the term(s) in double quotes, it does the same thing, no?
- reaperducer 8y ago
  No.
  - pasbesoin 8y ago
    I don't have the time and attention to reproduce the details now, but I want to say that the parent is not a glib answer. There are significant differences, where double quotes do not reproduce the plus operator's behavior and fall significantly short in terms of facility in controlling search results. More than one author has described this better than I can, in articles, blog posts, and comments. (If you can "find" them -- heh; but of an unexpected joke come up as I type this.)
    - pasbesoin 8y ago
      I'm not finding the pages I remember -- a bit ironic, and I checked DuckDuckGo to see whether that might change any... bias. But, here are a couple of starting points: -- "6 common misconceptions when doing advanced Google Searching" http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2015/10/6-common-misconceptions-when-doing.html http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2015/10/6-comm... (Blogger "Javascript era/template workaround): https://archive.is/7t28O https://archive.is/7t28O I wasn't aware of some of the tips described there, but still not parity. -- The + operator has been replaced. (google.com) 261 points by hammock on Oct 21, 2011 | hide | past | web | favorite | 167 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3140797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3140797

jdp23 8y ago

Yikes. A release in November introduced an API bug that was active for about 6 days, impacting 52.5 million users. * With respect to this API, apps that requested permission to view profile information that a user had added to their Google+ profile—like their name, email address, occupation, age (full list here)—were granted permission to view profile information about that user even when set to not-public. * In addition, apps with access to a user's Google+ profile data also had access to the profile data that had been shared with the consenting user by another Google+ user but that was not shared publicly.

morley 8y ago
FWIW, also from the blog post: > We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.
- foepys 8y ago
  Weren't they also saying somewhere that they are only keeping the logs from the last 3 months or so? So saying "we don't have evidence" might be true, but means nothing compared to the 6 year span the bug was present.
  - foota 8y ago
    6 days, not years.
- theWheez 8y ago
  That doesn't get as many clicks!
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    It still indicates a fairly massive failure in terms of process. If you have the tools to discover this in an automated fashion but those tools are not part of your release process so you find out about them in production a week later then something is quite borked. If Google Drive had a failure like this it would be a lot worse than Google+. And that's a much more complex environment.

ccnafr 8y ago

Actual announcement: https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expediting-changes-google-plus/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expeditin...

mc32 8y ago

I really don't care what they do with the consumer version (who uses it?), but I'd like to see mapping and wayfinding features added to the paid GSuite version.

FreeInFlorida 8y ago

Wait... Google+ had 52 million users? That should be the headline.

InclinedPlane 8y ago
Everyone with a gmail address or youtube account was strong armed into having a google+ account, which counts as their "userbase" regardless of whether or not any of those people actually made use of any google+ specific features.
- hdpq 8y ago
  then it should be more than 52,000,000 people.
  - what_ever 8y ago
    The vulnerability did not affect all of the users.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
qwerty456127 8y ago
I personally had some dozens thousands followers from all over the Earth on Google+, communicated to them actively through commenting and have occasionally met some of them offline when they traveled to my country.
dredmorbius 8y ago
There are over 3.3 billion G+ profiles, based on the March 2017 sitemaps files, though how many of those profiles are active is something of an open question. About 9% of Google+ accounts ever posted any public data. That's roughly 300 million profiles there, though for many of them, the posting was at best minimal. Based on publicly-visible posting activity, I and Stone Temple Consulting independently determined that there were ~4 - 16 million profiles publishing on a monthly basis or better in 1Q2015. Given other forms of participation, it's reasonable to assume a ~10x larger general active, but lurking, population, which gets us to about 40 - 160 million users. Various other forms of population estimation come up with fairly similar statistics. Keep in mind that until 2007, an online community with >10m users was extraordinary of itself. A few were larger (Google's own Blogger had 200m MUA in 2008, larger than Facebook at the time: https://techcrunch.com/2008/12/31/top-social-media-sites-of-2008-facebook-still-rising/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/12/31/top-social-media-sites-of-...). The most interesting thing about the 52 million user statistic reported is that it is in the general ballpark of at least one set of estimates of G+ user counts. A number on which Google have been showing remarkably more candor as of late, though far from crystal clarity.

shemnon42 8y ago

So is this four months per new leak found or "half the distance to the goal line?"

qwerty456127 8y ago

What are some good alternatives to Google+? I mean microblogs with subscribers/followers instead of friends, without a strict message length limit, with first-class comments, letting you to edit your posts and comments after you submit them and to limit access to particular post to a specific group of people?

r721 8y ago
Dreamwidth (Livejournal fork)? A recent Wired article: https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-bloggers-dreamwidth-pillowfort/ https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-porn-bloggers-dreamwidth-...
dredmorbius 8y ago
There's a range of options, though what exactly depends on your goals and communities. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Platforms_and_Sites https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Platforms_and_Sit...

qwerty456127 8y ago

How do I download all the discussions (posts with comments) I have participated in?

mikewhy 8y ago
Google Takeout has two different Google+ entries that may have what you're looking for.

jcoffland 8y ago

Does anyone know how or if this will affect OAuth2 logins? Several of the sites I run rely on Google OAuth2 and get the user's avatar using Google APIs. It's a simple thing that does not require Google+ but it's unclear to me how it will be affected. What is this the 3rd or 4th social network Google has failed at?

humanbeinc 8y ago
I second that... basically all tutorials out there make use of the google+ api to log in.. would be a huge fallout all over the web ^^
MiddleEndian 8y ago
This is why I gave up on oauth. In theory it's nice have somebody else manage your user accounts, but even facebook, which is not in imminent risk of a shutdown changes its API response periodically.
toyg 8y ago
It won't be affected. Google spent the last few years decoupling every useful G+ feature into standalone services, the account feature to me looks completely separate nowadays. Besides, without the OAuth provider, tons of integrations (that Google actively want on their products) would break. G+ was such a silly play, when you consider that Google already had the key to centralized identity all along: the ubiquitous GMail account. They will continue to push that for sure.

jacquesm 8y ago

So, how does Google, which we all trust with our precious data end up messing up like this several times in a row? If this is the company with the best security team in the world does that mean we should simply abandon all hope?

coliveira 8y ago
My opinion is that, given the infrastructure and practices we have, anything that is in digital form will be eventually hacked in one way or another. It is just a matter of time. Unfortunately the best security team can't do anything about it.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  It's depressing.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    Its liberating. There is no information immortality.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Hacked data is more, not less immortal.
      - conanbatt 8y ago
        Let me rephrase that: there is no information privilege immortality.
- eridius 8y ago
  The appropriate defense against this is to simply not collect any information that’s not necessary for the product, and any information you do collect, immediately anonymize (ideally client-side) and never keep the original data. Unfortunately, Google (and Facebook) has a business model that depends on acquiring as much personal data as possible and keeping it forever.

garysahota93 8y ago

They could have done soo much more with Google+ ... The hype was real up until launch. Really wish they had done things a little differently. Oh well... With all these leaks, I'm actually really glad they weren't successful with this.

toyg 8y ago
Even after launch. But the Real Names policy and lack of write api killed any momentum.

nullsmack 8y ago

Can we have Google Reader back now?

hdpq 8y ago
this is what i was looking for when i saw this headline.

DSingularity 8y ago

Data really has become radioactive.

dana321 8y ago
That is so true. Its like most of us live behind this wall of our behavior online, like it isn't shared unless there is a hack. But its sold, shared and traded without us knowing it, and used to display a reality tailored to us with the unintended consequence of us living in a bubble and not seeing much outside the edge of the bubble. This site is a great example of bubble breaking.

pmarreck 8y ago

Did they ever unfuck the merging of Google+ comments with YouTube comments?

dredmorbius 8y ago
Mostly.

newman314 8y ago

I suppose I’ll ask this here. Does anyone know of a good way to archive a Google+ group. There is a bunch of good info about hacking the Kankun smart plug that I would like to preserve.

dredmorbius 8y ago
No. There are some tools. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Data_Migration_Process_and_Considerations#Third_Party_Tools https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Data_Migration_Pr...

harbie 8y ago

Is it accurate to call this a leak if no one actually took advantage of the vulnerability?

svat 8y ago

There's a lot of great content on Google+. Is anyone working on a script to archive some of it before it all goes away? Perhaps the fine folks at the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)? Specifically, I'm wondering if someone's working on a script that does the following: - Ideally for each post URL given, it would preserve the post, and the comments (including the first few ones, not just the last few ones that are shown by default). It would be nice if it also preserves the +1s (including who +1d them), but that's optional. - And given a user, it would do the above for each (public) post of the user, or (optionally) use your account to save (just for yourself) the posts that you can see. There were a lot of people posting great stuff on G+ and resulting in wonderful thoughtful conversations (especially a couple of years ago), it would be shame to lose all that permanently. (If someone doubts this: see e.g. (if you're interested in mathematics) the posts by https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27 https://plus.google.com/+TerenceTao27 https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0 https://plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers0 https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999 https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999 etc, or https://plus.google.com/+DanPiponi https://plus.google.com/+DanPiponi for more CS-y stuff, or for more "general" stuff https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger etc -- and for all these people, especially in 2015-2016 or so.) Edit: You can download your own content using Google Takeout https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com. Just learnt of these other places where this question has been asked / is being asked: this G+ community (https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772 https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772) and this wiki (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page) -- if you have any answers those may be good places to post too :-)

pmlnr 8y ago
> Is anyone working on a script to archive some of it before it all goes away? Perhaps the fine folks at the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)? The archivist in me is screaming that yes, of course it should be archived. The web-old-timer in me just shakes his head that people never learn to keep a copy of their content on the actual free - as in freedom - web, on their own website. Let it be a mere text file, uploaded by ftp, or a WordPress, or anything, just do it. Nobody should expect others to archive it for them. (For more on the topic, see http://indieweb.org/why http://indieweb.org/why ). Back on topic: talk to https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page .

tptacek 8y ago

Again, this is poor reporting. It's newsworthy that Google+ found and disclosed a vulnerability in its own code, but there is no norm for reporting internally-discovered vulnerabilities and few companies reliably do it, especially in SAAS platforms where there's no end-user patching activity that needs to be motivated. There's a colorable argument that you don't even want this to be a norm, because of the incentive problems it creates: http://flaked.sockpuppet.org/2018/10/09/internal-disclosure-boring.html http://flaked.sockpuppet.org/2018/10/09/internal-disclosure-... Regardless: bear in mind that you haven't even heard about a fraction of the horrible vulnerabilities internal teams at tech companies have discovered over the years.

dredmorbius 8y ago
As someone in the heart of trying to help people get off G+, what's particularly newsworthy is that after two full months (and two days) of radio silence on the Google+ sunset, the first substantive comment from Google is ... that the sunset has been advanced by four months. We'd be recommending people be starting their migrations by Feb - May, and now they've got to complete them by April. That's something of a PITA. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Exodus_Planning_and_Scheduling#Phases https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Exodus_Planning_a... There are 7.9 million Google+ Communities. Sure, 3.9 million of those are 1 (or fewer) users, but that leaves tens of thousands of 1,000 or more members. Even at only a few percent of those as active, that's a lot of communities and people involved. And Google+ has no effective community migration process. Source on communities: I counted them myself, well, via sampling: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9zx67d/google_communities_membership_analysis_preview/ https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9zx67d/google_com...

afniljl 8y ago

I admit I actually rather liked Google+, for certain communities it was really active and well suited. However now that Google is decoupled and free from G+ shackles, it has really room to take off and grow in new areas, which is exciting to see. eg G+ logins will now be returned to G or Gmail branding, probably dramatically increases consumer confidence and mindshare, and other stuff. Developer teams can be fully redeployed to other products etc. Building of "micro" communities within Maps, YouTube, etc will accelerate, and that's really where it should be, rather than forced to accede to G+ product area.