8 ms·

Google+ cannot be used with customer or brand accounts anymore

92 points by anticensor 8y ago

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
My Google+ notifications were more active than they have been in months as everyone was checking in to see how much longer was left. Google didn't specify the time of the shutdown, just "sometime on April 2nd", so none of us were sure when the cutoff would be. Middle of the day, as it turns out.
- anticensor 8y ago
  Yes, the last day was probably the most active period of Google+.
neic 8y ago
ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/ http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/
- empyrical 8y ago
  I don't know if ArchiveTeam's bots can be logged in as Google Accounts, but I can still (for the time being at least!) browse around on a GSuite account, and an old grandfathered-in "Google Apps for Business" account
- orev 8y ago
  I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can think of.
  - stronglikedan 8y ago
    I wonder too. I was berated on here for mentioning that I deleted my reddit comments when I quit reddit, as if I was somehow stealing (my own content) from the users. Just weird IMO.
    - badsectoracula 8y ago
      Well, as a Reddit user i dislike these "delete old comments" scripts since i very often read old discussions about topics i find interesting and when i hit the occasional "deleted by script foo, do it yourself too because reddit evil" i get irritated since they make following that old discussion hard. It is your account of course, but i still dislike the practice since it goes counter to the entire purpose of a discussion site.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Several sites ingest and store Reddit comments forever. Scripts that overwrite old comments are ceremony for the user, nothing more.
        stronglikedan 8y ago
        > are ceremony for the user, nothing more. Only a small subset of users would be interested in those sites, and they likely don't come up in searches nearly as much as the original reddit post, so there's much more value to the deletion scripts than you are giving credit for.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Ironic considering you comment here and HN does not allow editing or deleting comments after a two hour window to protect discussion integrity.
      - stronglikedan 8y ago
        What do find ironic about it? It's two entirely different types of discourse, so it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Archive Team are absolute heros. The Google+ Mass Migration community learned of them and their "googleminus" project in January, and worked to help give information on the crawl, amount of data, and particulars of G+. arkiver and Fusl in particular have been absolutely amazing in what they've accomplished. They also managed to pull in 94.5% of all Google+ Communities, which should provide the ability to view posts by Community (they're otherwise scattered among user posts). We're still assessing how much of that was login-page redirects in the last hour or two of the crawl, but it's amazing work. I'd managed to send of about 80k larger, recently-active (100+ members, <30 day activity) over the past few weeks, with a final grab about 18 hours ago, using the Internet Archive's "save" URL. If you ever need to use that it's: https://web.archive.org/save/<URL> Where you replace "<URL>" with whatever it is you're trying to save, including the protocol string, say, this HN post: https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19556665 That can be scripted, and my submissions used a bog-simple Bash script and xargs to plow through 100k submissions (20k appear to have been dead) in about 90 minutes, on very modest hardware. Also: the Internet Archive (and Archive Team) run off volunteers and donations. You can help, and please do. https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/ https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Donate https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Donate (Not affiliated, but very grateful to them.)
- dymk 8y ago
  Does the ArchiveTeam coordinate with services like Google+ for archival? Are the techniques used (such as spreading the load across 1000s of separate IPs) used for anything other than getting around Google's integrity services e.g. ratelimiting? I'm really curious how such a large operation is legally pulled off, especially when services like Google+ intentionally try to make scraping difficult (and presumably for large offenders, will attempt a C&D).
  - stordoff 8y ago
    They use the ArchiveTeam Warrrior VM, so they have access to many public IPs: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warr...
  - ihuman 8y ago
    Sometimes the operators of a service will contact the ArchiveTeam and work with them to speed up the archival process. The file hosting service pomf.se did this when they were shutting down. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Pomf.se#Archiving https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Pomf.se#Archivin...
- creato 8y ago
  I've been surprised that there hasn't been much pushback/questioning (from what I've seen) on this archive effort. Of course people voluntarily published the information here. But they also had at least a little control over how and what was presented to the world. Now they don't. Is archive team going to respond if someone finds something in the archive they want to take down? Is there a listing somewhere of exactly what is archived (does it include pictures from google plus?)? I couldn't find it, and I don't want to go rooting around in the actual archive itself (if that is even possible).
  - flatline 8y ago
    I find it curious and saddening that this is becoming an expectation. Someone voluntarily publishes something for the world to see - they are certainly within their rights to issue a retraction, but they have long since relinquished control over others’ actions with the data they published. This is pretty fundamental to how the internet works. The fact that there is now an expectation of continued control over said data just shows how far companies like Facebook have gone toward fundamentally changing the nature of the internet.
    - sebthedev 8y ago
      Under many data privacy laws, data subjects have a legal "right to correct" any inaccurate personal data concerning him or her. GDPR: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      The internet was created in a different age. The kinds of abuses people are worrying about right now were barely even possible when the Internet was created. Now they're quite feasible using relatively inexpensive and well-known technology, and people who are eager to share the knowledge of how to do it have created all sorts of MOOCs and bootcamps and even accredited degree programs on the subject.
- mbell 8y ago
  This is rather creepy if I'm honest - why are you scraping user's profile data? Is there a way I can request that you delete any of my data that may be in there?
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Only what was public was scrapped. You can make a request to the Internet Archive to remove your content when they have ingested it and made it available.
joeblau 8y ago
The title should say: Google plus cannot be used.
- anticensor 8y ago
  G Suite and Google internal accounts still work.
CrankyBear 8y ago
I'm going to miss it. A lot.
cydonian_monk 8y ago
And the shutdown seems to be fuzzy, because I can still post to Google+, +1 things, and presumably do other usual G+ things despite it telling me it's shutdown. Now I'm only occasionally reloading to watch my follower count drop as things get deleted. I still feel the early variant of + with the original implementation of Circles (back in 2012) was one of the most useful takes on social sharing I've come across. And it worked especially well for photographers. Once they moved everybody to Collections I stopped using it with any regularity, and stuck mostly to groups/Communities. Hitching YouTube to it was basically the last straw. When I made a farewell post last month it had been about four years since my previous completely-Public post. The platform had flaws, and I'm a bit sad to see it go, but I won't particularly miss it. Cheers,
orblivion 8y ago
"Looks like you've reached the end"
obelos 8y ago
Though I suppose I've gotten accustomed to using double quotes to specify mandatory search terms, perhaps we can get back the `+foo` search syntax that was so unceremoniously taken from us and reappropriated for Google+?
dredmorbius 8y ago
When Google first announced its plans to shut down G+, originally slated for August 2019, a few of us started looking at the question of helping people and communities (in both the technical "G+ Community", and the social "community of people" senses) keep intact. For all the ribbing G+ gets, the problem is a big one. And it's not one that's specific to Google+. As the regular parade of shut-down announcements of services and firms on HN attests, online mediated services can be cancelled, often quite abruptly. And there's often very little notice. The world of social media sites is likely to go through more shakeups, for various reasons (and there are a number of sites presently looking pretty shaky), while the options for alternative provisioning of similar services (and the question of whether what we now call "social media" really is a net positive or something people want, need, or even should use) either personally or at a more local scale (though through what institutions isn't entirely clear) is a possibility. Projects such as IndieWeb, the POSSE initiative ("post on (your own) server, syndicate elsewhere"), federated protocols, IPFS, DAT, Beaker browser, and more (I've been discovering a lot in the past six months) may break us out of the current proprietary silo model. Or not. The technical landscape is confusing, technical skills are limited, and the risks of DiY hosting can be large. It's a difficult trade-off. Though it's one I'd like to explore. There are huge changes that have and will be happening on the regulatory front, from privacy to copyright to liability to propaganda and disinformation, and far more. Some of these laws and regulation seem written with self-service in mind, many do not. That's a whole 'nother field. (I've got a To-Do item to get ahold of the EFF on these questions, as well as other groups.) And then there's the whole fact that the tech world is in the midst of a (very well deserved IMO) backlash for its cavalier attitudes abuses and outright harm inflicted on both individuals and society as a whole. The promise of the 1990s has not been delivered. Back to the group: we looked at the problem of migrating, realised there were many different users and groups, with different interests, and a wide range of technical abilities, from top-tier Linux kernel hackers (Alan Cox) to none at all. Some are best served by commercial solutions, for now, but many can look at federated or self-service options. We put together FAQs and Wikis and discussion forums and gathered a lot of data (we seem to have the best information outside Google on the actual size and scope of G+ users, data, and communities), and more. All inside six months. It's been a group effort, and a lot of people contributed. I need to dig through my G+ archives to find the thank yous I'd posted earlier today, but it's substantial, and that was only a partial list. What I hope is that others can use and be helped by what we've done. The wiki is https://social.antefriguserat.de https://social.antefriguserat.de and there's a subreddit at https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus Both will continue to be active over coming months, we're only part-way through the process, and still need to establish ourselves in our new spaces.

92 points by anticensor 8y ago

My Google+ notifications were more active than they have been in months as everyone was checking in to see how much longer was left. Google didn't specify the time of the shutdown, just "sometime on April 2nd", so none of us were sure when the cutoff would be. Middle of the day, as it turns out.

anticensor 8y ago
Yes, the last day was probably the most active period of Google+.

neic 8y ago

ArchiveTeam did manage to scrape ~98.6% of the user profiles before it went down. It was around 16 hours from completion when Google pulled the plug. It was done with the distributed scraper 'Warrior' using a massive amount of small cloud instances to spread the load to 1000s of IP adresses. The dataset is ~1.45 PB. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/ http://tracker.archiveteam.org/googleplus/

empyrical 8y ago
I don't know if ArchiveTeam's bots can be logged in as Google Accounts, but I can still (for the time being at least!) browse around on a GSuite account, and an old grandfathered-in "Google Apps for Business" account
orev 8y ago
I really wonder what is so valuable about saving everything on the Internet. For all of human history until now, every little human interaction was fleeting and only meant something to the people involved. Things that were significant were preserved when the people involved decided they were important. Now we are trying to keep every one of those insignificant things, for what purpose? Training an AI is all I can think of.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  I wonder too. I was berated on here for mentioning that I deleted my reddit comments when I quit reddit, as if I was somehow stealing (my own content) from the users. Just weird IMO.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    Well, as a Reddit user i dislike these "delete old comments" scripts since i very often read old discussions about topics i find interesting and when i hit the occasional "deleted by script foo, do it yourself too because reddit evil" i get irritated since they make following that old discussion hard. It is your account of course, but i still dislike the practice since it goes counter to the entire purpose of a discussion site.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Several sites ingest and store Reddit comments forever. Scripts that overwrite old comments are ceremony for the user, nothing more.
      - stronglikedan 8y ago
        > are ceremony for the user, nothing more. Only a small subset of users would be interested in those sites, and they likely don't come up in searches nearly as much as the original reddit post, so there's much more value to the deletion scripts than you are giving credit for.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Ironic considering you comment here and HN does not allow editing or deleting comments after a two hour window to protect discussion integrity.
    - stronglikedan 8y ago
      What do find ironic about it? It's two entirely different types of discourse, so it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Archive Team are absolute heros. The Google+ Mass Migration community learned of them and their "googleminus" project in January, and worked to help give information on the crawl, amount of data, and particulars of G+. arkiver and Fusl in particular have been absolutely amazing in what they've accomplished. They also managed to pull in 94.5% of all Google+ Communities, which should provide the ability to view posts by Community (they're otherwise scattered among user posts). We're still assessing how much of that was login-page redirects in the last hour or two of the crawl, but it's amazing work. I'd managed to send of about 80k larger, recently-active (100+ members, <30 day activity) over the past few weeks, with a final grab about 18 hours ago, using the Internet Archive's "save" URL. If you ever need to use that it's: https://web.archive.org/save/<URL> Where you replace "<URL>" with whatever it is you're trying to save, including the protocol string, say, this HN post: https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19556665 That can be scripted, and my submissions used a bog-simple Bash script and xargs to plow through 100k submissions (20k appear to have been dead) in about 90 minutes, on very modest hardware. Also: the Internet Archive (and Archive Team) run off volunteers and donations. You can help, and please do. https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/ https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Donate https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Donate (Not affiliated, but very grateful to them.)
dymk 8y ago
Does the ArchiveTeam coordinate with services like Google+ for archival? Are the techniques used (such as spreading the load across 1000s of separate IPs) used for anything other than getting around Google's integrity services e.g. ratelimiting? I'm really curious how such a large operation is legally pulled off, especially when services like Google+ intentionally try to make scraping difficult (and presumably for large offenders, will attempt a C&D).
- stordoff 8y ago
  They use the ArchiveTeam Warrrior VM, so they have access to many public IPs: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warr...
- ihuman 8y ago
  Sometimes the operators of a service will contact the ArchiveTeam and work with them to speed up the archival process. The file hosting service pomf.se did this when they were shutting down. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Pomf.se#Archiving https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Pomf.se#Archivin...
creato 8y ago
I've been surprised that there hasn't been much pushback/questioning (from what I've seen) on this archive effort. Of course people voluntarily published the information here. But they also had at least a little control over how and what was presented to the world. Now they don't. Is archive team going to respond if someone finds something in the archive they want to take down? Is there a listing somewhere of exactly what is archived (does it include pictures from google plus?)? I couldn't find it, and I don't want to go rooting around in the actual archive itself (if that is even possible).
- flatline 8y ago
  I find it curious and saddening that this is becoming an expectation. Someone voluntarily publishes something for the world to see - they are certainly within their rights to issue a retraction, but they have long since relinquished control over others’ actions with the data they published. This is pretty fundamental to how the internet works. The fact that there is now an expectation of continued control over said data just shows how far companies like Facebook have gone toward fundamentally changing the nature of the internet.
  - sebthedev 8y ago
    Under many data privacy laws, data subjects have a legal "right to correct" any inaccurate personal data concerning him or her. GDPR: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    The internet was created in a different age. The kinds of abuses people are worrying about right now were barely even possible when the Internet was created. Now they're quite feasible using relatively inexpensive and well-known technology, and people who are eager to share the knowledge of how to do it have created all sorts of MOOCs and bootcamps and even accredited degree programs on the subject.
mbell 8y ago
This is rather creepy if I'm honest - why are you scraping user's profile data? Is there a way I can request that you delete any of my data that may be in there?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Only what was public was scrapped. You can make a request to the Internet Archive to remove your content when they have ingested it and made it available.

joeblau 8y ago

The title should say: Google plus cannot be used.

anticensor 8y ago
G Suite and Google internal accounts still work.

CrankyBear 8y ago

I'm going to miss it. A lot.

cydonian_monk 8y ago

And the shutdown seems to be fuzzy, because I can still post to Google+, +1 things, and presumably do other usual G+ things despite it telling me it's shutdown. Now I'm only occasionally reloading to watch my follower count drop as things get deleted. I still feel the early variant of + with the original implementation of Circles (back in 2012) was one of the most useful takes on social sharing I've come across. And it worked especially well for photographers. Once they moved everybody to Collections I stopped using it with any regularity, and stuck mostly to groups/Communities. Hitching YouTube to it was basically the last straw. When I made a farewell post last month it had been about four years since my previous completely-Public post. The platform had flaws, and I'm a bit sad to see it go, but I won't particularly miss it. Cheers,

orblivion 8y ago

"Looks like you've reached the end"

obelos 8y ago

Though I suppose I've gotten accustomed to using double quotes to specify mandatory search terms, perhaps we can get back the `+foo` search syntax that was so unceremoniously taken from us and reappropriated for Google+?

dredmorbius 8y ago

When Google first announced its plans to shut down G+, originally slated for August 2019, a few of us started looking at the question of helping people and communities (in both the technical "G+ Community", and the social "community of people" senses) keep intact. For all the ribbing G+ gets, the problem is a big one. And it's not one that's specific to Google+. As the regular parade of shut-down announcements of services and firms on HN attests, online mediated services can be cancelled, often quite abruptly. And there's often very little notice. The world of social media sites is likely to go through more shakeups, for various reasons (and there are a number of sites presently looking pretty shaky), while the options for alternative provisioning of similar services (and the question of whether what we now call "social media" really is a net positive or something people want, need, or even should use) either personally or at a more local scale (though through what institutions isn't entirely clear) is a possibility. Projects such as IndieWeb, the POSSE initiative ("post on (your own) server, syndicate elsewhere"), federated protocols, IPFS, DAT, Beaker browser, and more (I've been discovering a lot in the past six months) may break us out of the current proprietary silo model. Or not. The technical landscape is confusing, technical skills are limited, and the risks of DiY hosting can be large. It's a difficult trade-off. Though it's one I'd like to explore. There are huge changes that have and will be happening on the regulatory front, from privacy to copyright to liability to propaganda and disinformation, and far more. Some of these laws and regulation seem written with self-service in mind, many do not. That's a whole 'nother field. (I've got a To-Do item to get ahold of the EFF on these questions, as well as other groups.) And then there's the whole fact that the tech world is in the midst of a (very well deserved IMO) backlash for its cavalier attitudes abuses and outright harm inflicted on both individuals and society as a whole. The promise of the 1990s has not been delivered. Back to the group: we looked at the problem of migrating, realised there were many different users and groups, with different interests, and a wide range of technical abilities, from top-tier Linux kernel hackers (Alan Cox) to none at all. Some are best served by commercial solutions, for now, but many can look at federated or self-service options. We put together FAQs and Wikis and discussion forums and gathered a lot of data (we seem to have the best information outside Google on the actual size and scope of G+ users, data, and communities), and more. All inside six months. It's been a group effort, and a lot of people contributed. I need to dig through my G+ archives to find the thank yous I'd posted earlier today, but it's substantial, and that was only a partial list. What I hope is that others can use and be helped by what we've done. The wiki is https://social.antefriguserat.de https://social.antefriguserat.de and there's a subreddit at https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus Both will continue to be active over coming months, we're only part-way through the process, and still need to establish ourselves in our new spaces.