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Google+ for consumers will shut down on April 2nd
- js4ever 8y agoI guess no one will really regret Google+
- geerlingguy 8y agoThe lack of activity in this thread is quite appropriate. Another one bites the dust.
- chomp 8y agoI'm a little saddened to hear this because there's some high quality posts on Google+ that we're going to lose (Linus and other FOSS people posted on there.) I always enjoyed reading some of the things they put on there.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoEmail me breadcrumbs and I’ll get them into the Wayback Machine.
- Pamar 8y agoPlease start with this: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
- skarz 8y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20190131083617/https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://web.archive.org/web/20190131083617/https://plus.goog...
- SkyMarshal 8y agoHaha, recognized that one from the URL, was going to post it too if someone else didn't. Ironic that that's the most famous post on Google+.
- mcv 8y agoI'd love to have a general archive of all public Google+ posts. I've seen some great and valuable discussions there.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoIt is in progress with ArchiveTeam.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThere is an ArchiveTeam project to save public content from G+ to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine GoogleMinus: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google%2B https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google%2B
- dredmorbius 8y agoAlso: if you have a list of content you want to save to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, you can submit that using the URL: https://web.archive.org/save/<URL> Where <URL> is the archive to save. This can easily be scripted to run off a large list of URLs and submitted automatically. I've done this on over 10,000 URLs over about 2 hours. curl -s -I -H "Accept: application/json" "https://web.archive.org/save/${1}" | grep '^x-cache-key:' | sed "s,https,&://,; s,\(${1}\).*$,\1," Save that as "archive-url". xargs -I{} -P 10 -m 1 archive-url {} <urlfile Where urlfile is a list of items to archive. This is a legit use of the Wayback Machine, FWIW. There are also browser extensions and a (currently broken) DDG bang: !save
- skybrian 8y agoI haven't found a good alternative yet. There doesn't seem to be a consensus. Ideally I'd like a place where people can subscribe without being my friend, you don't need to jump through hoops to leave a comment, and I can moderate the comments. (Delete if necessary.) Traditionally that would be a blog, but I don't know how many people would subscribe these days.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoFacebook does have this functionality. If you're willing to use Facebook.
- skybrian 8y agoI have a Facebook account, but I don't want to spam my friends and relatives with my blogging. It has to be opt-in.
- PretzelFisch 8y agoHave you thought about just running a forum?
- ryl00 8y agoreddit?
- dredmorbius 8y ago
- tdurden 8y agoG+ has been dead for a _long_ time. Google has actually let this service stick around much longer than others it killed with far more active users.
- Kye 8y agoThey probably had a lot to untangle from their systems after they tried to make it the company's sole focus.
- skybrian 8y agoA dead language is one nobody speaks. There are still some of us on Google+, so no it's not dead yet. I don't really get this attitude. If a web forum that most people haven't heard of with ~100 users shut down, it would still be sad for those users.
- tdurden 8y ago> If a web forum that most people haven't heard of with ~100 users shut down, it would still be sad for those users. I agree. I was really referring to G+ being even a remote competitor to FB, which it never was. It is definitely a loss to see it go, but not unexpected.
- mcv 8y agoThey shouldn't have tried to make it defeat FB. They should have let it be its own thing. For a while, Google+ was far superior to Facebook or Twitter, even if less people were using it. They should have stuck with that.
- Kye 8y agoIt was a different era. All the marketing press was talking about how focused search, like Amazon and Facebook's own search systems, would be the death of Google. They seemed to believe it.
- tomjen3 8y ago
- wyxuan 8y agoDoes this imply that G+ will still live on a some kind of enterprise product or what? I think they could have done a good job if they increased the integration with Gmail.
- dredmorbius 8y agoYes, Google+ will continue to exist for G Suite customers (enterprise), though only accessible to other users within the G Suite domain. It will have little similarity to the present experience, other than interface.
- jamescostian 8y agoThe date signals that on April 1st (aka April Fool's day), Google will announce that they're resurrecting Google+
- mikejb 8y agoThey'll announce a completely new product: G++.
- briandear 8y agoOr maybe G#?
- omgtehlion 8y agothat's microsoft's shtick
- pauljurczak 8y agoGScript
- terandle 8y agoI just want them to announce a new RSS feed reader since their last one was sacrificed at the altar of G+
- PurpleRamen 8y agoThis is now covered by Google News. Well, maybe if they shutdown this too...
- exodust 8y agoA better fool would be the resurrection of Google Buzz.
- jobigoud 8y agoOr Google Wave.
- systematical 8y agoI was never really sure what they were trying to do with marketing it, the feature set, or the vanilla design. Pretty sure my first and only post on there was "RIP Google+ 2011-2011"
- tonymet 8y agofor a while Google + was a great place to get news and updates without garbage
- PretzelFisch 8y agoIt served well as a private group place to post stuff, and a nice public place to follow others who wanted to type more then twitter allowed.
- Causality1 8y agoFor years I have resisted allowing the creation of a google+ profile on my behalf. I wonder, on April 2nd will my plus-less YouTube account finally be able to comment and message again?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- klodolph 8y agoThis happened a couple years ago. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2663685?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2663685?hl=en
- guessmyname 8y agoThat’s interesting, because I haven’t been able to log into my YouTube account since Aug 2015 after they suspended a channel where I was uploading educational videos about Linux-related stuff. I remember someone submitted a bunch of DMCA requests, and at the time the refutal process was very slow, I couldn’t prove the ownership of my videos and the channel was suspended. Since then, every time I click the “Sign in” button on YouTube, I get redirected to this page [1]. Recently I found a channel with videos downloaded from my channel, so I assumed they were the ones who submitted the DMCA requests years ago. I went ahead and pulled the same charade, I asked some of my friends to report those videos as “offensive” and a few days later they were removed. [1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=youtube https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=youtube
- wyclif 8y agoOnce Google+ for consumers is gone, what will be the state of YouTube URLs? Let's say I want a specific URL on YT. Like, say, www.youtube.com/user/mylastname or something like that. How can I obtain that after April 2nd?
- abtinf 8y agoIt’s too bad g+ destroyed Reader before it died. Reader could have been just a few development sprints away from replicating most of facebooks features.
- keyle 8y agoAt least this time they waited a really long time before pulling the plug. So no one is having a big tanty.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wl 8y agoDoes this mean we'll get our plus operator back?
- curlypaul924 8y agoIt disappeared long before Google+, didn't it? But yeah, I want plus back too.
- est 8y agoDoes this mean we'll get our Google Reader back?
- dingaling 8y agoWhy feed Google even more data about your interests? Just use a local RSS aggregator.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- its_y0ur_boy 8y agoF
- exodust 8y agoGoes to show that aggressively pushing products down user's throats doesn't work in the end. Even to leave a star rating for an app on the play store, without a comment, you had to have a G+ profile. It was idiotic how much they pushed Google+. Also a bad name. "Plus".... plus what? Who knows!
- wenderen 8y agoI haven't rated apps in years thanks to this policy. I wonder what other quality of life improvements will resurface after G+ for consumers is shuttered.
- skarz 8y agoI think the real reason why G+ didn't take off is because younger people were oversaturated with social media networks and most older people had already learned how to use Facebook. I think if I approached any of my older relatives with G+ they would have surely said "But I just learned how to use Facebook, now you want me to learn ANOTHER website!" The fact that any of my aging relatives is on Facebook is a miracle in and of itself. I think G+ had done everything correctly, it was just too late. Same reason why there are still no real competitors to Facebook. The real question is... How does Google unfuck all of the mandatory G+ integration that they forced on everyone?
- rbritton 8y agoIt also had some very opaque errors that never were resolved, suffering from the same lack of customer support Google is well-known for. At one point I tried setting up a business page on it, but something in the verification got “stuck” causing most actions to edit anything to error out with no recourse.
- taneq 8y agoThe big issue for me and a lot of the community was their policy on mandatory use of real names. Facebook wanted to own your online identity but Google wanted to own your real-life identity. The moment they started pushing that policy G+ turned into a ghost town. The mandatory G+ integration, btw, was one of the core goals of G+ IMO. They wanted to tie everyone's accounts together into a single entity (again, owning your identity) and G+ was the chosen vehicle.
- wtmt 8y agoThough Google is in the tracking business, the increasing lack of diversity in social media platforms is highly disturbing. Now Facebook (with all its platforms) is the biggest, and the next is...who? Probably a limited service with a single digit share? When companies with so much money fail miserably (and put up with lousy decisions that were known soon after the decisions were acted upon), everyone loses. Way too much hubris is one reason for this, and Google seems to have that in many pockets in the organization, going by how many services it has killed in the past.
- TylerE 8y agoTwitter, surely?
- gnachman 8y agoThe real tragedy is that g+ wrecked Google. It was a nice place to work that I was proud of. They got scared of Facebook and threw out reason, taste, common sense, and ethics in an incompetent desperate rush to win Social. It was deeply saddening to watch it happen. Now the parasite is gone but too late for the host.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gman83 8y agoSo now you work for Facebook like that's better?
- foo101 8y agoWhy would you make such an unfounded assumption and ask a loaded question?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vageli 8y agoOP _does_ work for WhatsApp and is fairly well-known in general as being the creator of iTerm2.
- pixelbath 8y agoWhich means...what, exactly? That OP is not allowed to complain about the previous company because he/she works at a different company with its own problems?
- vageli 8y ago> That OP is not allowed to complain about the previous company because he/she works at a different company with its own problems? I was addressing foo101 who stated that gman83 asked a loaded, unfounded question. The question is not unfounded because OP works for WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook.
- pauljurczak 8y agoApril 1st would be a much more appropriate date for this monumental screw up.
- dallas 8y agoG+ was _the_ place to be for one of my hobbies (OSR/DIY D&D). A massive blow. I made jokes about if we hang in there and don't get taken in the Google+ Rapture, things will go on like normal. Turns out G Suite users get to keep G+ and I'm a GAFYD user since the beginning. Yay for me? Everyone is now displaced. Facebook is universally reviled as an option, Mastodon/Diaspora has attracted a whopping several folks. Some others tried starting forums to no avail. Discord seems to be doing well for many but not a majority. MeWe is the only platform that people seem to "get" but it has a controversy to it. Nevertheless, the blogs still seem to be ticking along.
- artificialLimbs 8y agoCurious to know the MeWe controversy. I just quit Facebook after being 3 day censored for posting a link to a Twitter video that was played on CNN. Joined MeWe to hopefully help build a replacement network.
- Pamar 8y agoWhen I announced (on Google+) that I was moving to MeWe and was, obviously, suggesting everyone to follow me there I got a couple of comments saying that MeWe was some sort of New-Right bastion. To be honest, I have not encountered any of that, but then I have only joined (or created) a very small number of groups and they were all for specific hobbies/interests. Another (possible) problem is mature content and sex bots. The former is easy to solve, you just block or leave users/groups that post mature stuff if this is not your cup of tea. Bots are a bit more annoying but every group has at least a moderator so they are quickly disposed of.
- dallas 8y agoYes - that's the controversy I'm referring to. I'm on MeWe and haven't encountered any people there that I have followed specifically discussing far-right/alt-right topics except for a couple of folks posting in groups who have made a brand of it (e.g. "The RPG Pundit" and the ex-CEO of Milo Inc. who published an OSR D&D retroclone), but at the time I joined up, all of the political groups in the directory were right-wing or nationalist, and this coinciding with the time Gab was shut down. The sex bot thing has been a problem for a while. I _think_ group owners have been blocking them, and of course I block them, but they still somehow linger to post, and the notifications of their post are not blocked. At least that's how it was about a week ago - seems to have been fixed, or the bots in question have been eradicated.
- valtism 8y agoI appreciate that they are willing to pull the plug on something like this early in order to stop potential data breaches when they can see that they don't have to tools to reliably prevent them. I feel like many other companies would not take these risks into account and instead keep their services running until a major breach did happen.
- mcv 8y agoAs far as I can tell, the data breach is merely an excuse to pull the plug. I don't think anything remotely serious was leaked, certainly not in comparison to Facebook or other leaks.
- bootlooped 8y agoCircles was a great idea. Too bad they failed to attract many users.
- Corrado 8y agoI came here to say this. I loved the idea of Circles, it makes so much more sense than whatever Facebook is doing. I'm just sad it was attached to Google+.
- jchallis 8y agoGoogle+ was one of the few places on the Internet I could go to be alone. Everywhere else seems so damn full of people.
- crystaln 8y agoThe real tragedy here is the destruction of Reader for a failed and ill-conceived product. Had Google used the passionate Reader community as a base to build a high quality content based social network, they would be a powerful force in social and could have an enormous positive social impact.
- speedplane 8y agoReader had nothing to do with Google+, yet the comparison is still relevant. It would have been much easier to turn Reader into a social network than to create one from scratch. It's still shocking to me that Google shut down reader. I'm not sure I've come across any company that has abandoned such a beloved product.
- lucaspottersky 8y agoof course it does. when they decided to shut it down it was because they wanted to channel Readers users to Google+
- mcv 8y agoA system that does both social networking and RSS reading, and enables blog sharing and commenting in a integrated way, could be absolutely perfect.
- crystaln 8y agoThey shut Reader down specifically to shift users over to G+, instead of turning Reader into a broader social network. This would be like if Mark Zuckerberg had shut down Facebook b/c he didn't want to build a yearbook product and started Socialbook to replace it.
- foo101 8y agoWhat is "Google+ for consumers"? Is it different from the Google+ a regular user like me?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoNo, regular users are using G+ for consumers, and that's what's shutting down, G+ for enterprise will still be around, as an internal social platform for employees of an organization to communicate with each other.
- EGreg 8y agoWHY! What do they lose by keeping it up?
- anonytrary 8y agoTime and money?
- toper-centage 8y agoIt has serious security risks that are too expensive to fix for a useless project?
- EGreg 8y agoLike what?
- DarrenZ 8y agoWhat no one has mentioned so far is that this will have a direct impact on any sites, forums, apps, etc. that use Google+ Oauth for Google log in. My own support forum does and I received my first email about this only a couple of days ago. >Please update your projects listed below by March 7, 2019 and ensure they are no longer using Google+ APIs, or requesting Google+ OAuth scopes. Sure, it won't be that difficult to change, but this isn't something you do every day. You do it once and then forget about it. The initial investigation of how to add a Google login and then implementing it was done 2 years ago -- now I have to go off and research and learn how to do it all again in a different way.
- kkarakk 8y agog+ oauth already aren't working properly on a couple of sites that i frequent(older chatboards)
- ygra 8y agoWe've received such an email on 2019-01-29, warning us that some parts of the API may fail as early as 2019-02-15 or 2019-01-28. IOW, breakage may have begun before the notification. Fun.
- dredmorbius 8y agoInteresting to hear that it's not just G+ users who are getting dumped on by Google here. Dropping functionality the day before the notice is sent is ... troubling. As I've noted about several similar such instances previously: this is the company that wants us to trust it to build driverless cars and other such systems? Vastly better process and respect is required.
- zawerf 8y agoGoogle's own tutorials for node.js recommends using passport.js with google oauth: https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/getting-started/authenticate-users https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/getting-started/authenticate... But that library hasn't been updated to not use the deprecated api yet: https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-google-oauth2/issues/50 https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-google-oauth2/issues... And even when the fix lands, you still need to make specific code changes for it. They can't possibly expect everyone to fix their social login code in time right? 50k weekly downloads: https://www.npmjs.com/package/passport-google-oauth20 https://www.npmjs.com/package/passport-google-oauth20
- hema_n 8y agoIt is very sad that Google+ is going to shut down.
- ggambetta 8y agoPour one out for Emerald Sea.
- ArrayList 8y agoAnd nothing of value was lost.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoMore generally, I feel Google should wherever possible have an exit plan for any product they launch. Make sure the account/code systems etc can be separated if they wish. This big launch and plug pull are an ongoing problem and creating loss of trust and uptake. A good solution IMO would be to (wherever viable) let willing devs continue a product when Google decide they are out. Be it open source the project, or offer it to teams that worked on it if they want to continue it as a business under a new brand.
- speeder 8y agoI wonder if I will get the + operator back on search, since it disappeared searching became a huge pain in the ass, only reason I still use Google search is because is default everywhere....
- donohoe 8y agoAnyone know if we can expect to get "+" back as a search operator? (it used to be, then they dropped it with Google+ launch)
- thunderbong 8y agoSeriously. That's exactly the same thing that went though my mind when I read the title. They obsessed over the plus like crazy. Removing it from search, removing it as the icon to open a new tab in Chrome. I still remember thinking "This is so petty and trivial. If Google+ is so great, it'll stand on its own feet, regardless of the number of plus signs"
- thosakwe 8y agoMy real question is what this means for OAuth.
- nojvek 8y agoDoesn’t Jeff Dean still use Google+ for his ramblings. How can they do this? Honestly that is the only reason I use Google+. So I can follow a bunch of people. I hate Facebook, I hate twitter. It’s infested with ads. Google+ was a great idea if google just stayed calm.
- dekhn 8y agoI was onstage at Google IO one year (Urs and I launched Google Compute Engine). ALl our practice sessions were preempted by Vic Gundotra (launching G+ Events) and Sergey Brin (launching Google Glass with the most epic tech demo I've ever seen). But now, the first two are dead products while GCE makes $$$ for Google. It was a real FU to me and my coworkers, and even then it was obvious that social and glass weren't billion-dollar products.
- dredmorbius 8y agoI've been a long time user, and critic, of Google+. Now I'm helping those who want to move off it to find new homes, which has been interesting in itself. I'd previously measured active public G+ posting activity, by way of the site's own Sitemap files. Stone Temple Consulting expanded those methods to show that: * 91% of all G+ profiles (2.2 billion at the time) had never posted publicly. * About 5% (110 million) profiles showed some public posting activity, other than YouTube (a factor that had inflated apparent activity markedly). * About 6.5 million profiles (0.3%) had over 50 posts ever. * About 3.5 million profiles (0.16%) had over 50 posts and activity within the previous 30 days. That from March of 2015, based on a very large sample of 500,000 randomly selected profiles, using methods I'd developed a few months earlier. More recently I've been looking at G+ communities, on which there'd been virtually no quantifiable information. There are over 8 million of these, though the vast majority have few members and little activity: the 45%ile membership is 1, the mode is 2, the mean around 130, itself far above the 95%ile (118.5). There are 66 communities of 1 million or more members, 1,100 > 100k, 10,044 > 10k, 64,775 > 1k, and 390,390 > 100. I've found vital communities across these size ranges, with over 100,000 having 100+ members and activity within seven days prior to accessing, over January 5-6, 2019. Bigger isn't necessarily better. Looking at interactions (posts, comments, plus-ones, shares) by community, size matters little. It's the posting activity that drives other engagement, and the per-member engagement tends to peak between about 100 and 3,000 members. Many of those communities are looking to move elsewhere, as are other G+ users and less formal social or other groups. Among the frustrations Google has thrown at them, the two leading official Google+ Community-focused communities, Google+ Moderators and Google+ Aspire, were shut down by Google before most communities had really started addressing migration. In the case of the first, Google shut down the community for six weeks without any notice, with users posts sitting in limbo "held for review", but appearing as if they'd been posted by the author. In the second case, an 80,000 member community focused on Community leaders was shut down without any prior notice. There are several places Plussers can go for information and coordination. The Google+ Mass Migration community, over 4,000 members since 8 October 2018, is the central discussion point on the site itself: https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772/ https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772/ There are numerous off-G+ rallying points, with the /r/plexodus on Reddit specifically aimed at the migration process itself: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus And there's a Wiki with extensive information, including FAQs, planning guides, platform comparisons, data migration information, and directories of users, communities, and off-G+ meeting points, and more. Much a work in progress, but again, useful to those migrating off the platform: https://social.antefriguserat.de https://social.antefriguserat.de Links to many other communities, sites, and resources are included at all the above. I'm finding the process and prospect of moving some ... not entirely clear number of users ... off a dying platform and onto new homes a hugely interesting prospect. There's an opportunity to break out of the surveillance capitalism disinformation monopolist mold, and also risks. I've found out a tremendous amount about developments over the past 5-10 years in online, social, and user-generated media, been digging back through history, discovering I'm in close contact with some very knowledgeable people (a key Project Xanadu member has been in my Google circles for years, I've just learnt), and more. And there's a lot we're sorting out about what a migration process entails and requires, and the distinctions between succesful migrations and failures. I see this being useful to others in the future, possibly sooner than we might expect. Interesting times.