Sunsetting Google Plus
The review did highlight the significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets consumers’ expectations. Given these challenges and the very low usage of the consumer version of Google+, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+.
To give people a full opportunity to transition, we will implement this wind-down over a 10-month period, slated for completion by the end of next August. Over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data.
At the same time, we have many enterprise customers who are finding great value in using Google+ within their companies. Our review showed that Google+ is better suited as an enterprise product where co-workers can engage in internal discussions on a secure corporate social network.
Eight years ago my friends at Google were having their compensation made conditional on the successful launch of Google+. This was the outcome we all predicted, but it took much longer than expected.
Google+ was unmotivated by any need for what it did. No one loved it. It was born only to slow Facebook growth. It’s like having a kid so it can beat up your neighbor’s kid. Products, to be any good, must be motivated, have a creative purpose.
Google exposed the personal information of hundreds of thousands of users of its Google+ social network, the company announced in a blog post this morning. The news, originally reported by The Wall Street Journal ahead of Google’s announcement, means that Google+ profile information like name, email address, occupation, gender, and age were exposed, even when that data was listed as private and not public. However, Google says that it has no evidence to suggest any third-party developers were aware of the bug or abused it. The bug, affecting an API that was accessed by hundreds of developers, appears to have been active between 2015 and 2018.
The company says it closed the bug in March 2018 shortly after learning of its existence. The WSJ reports that the company chose not to report it because of fear of “immediate regulatory interest” that would lump Google in with Facebook, according to one source’s description of the incident.
That this disclosure wasn’t made until today — seven months after this breach was noticed — is unconscionable. But it is outrageous that the reason for not disclosing it in the first place was because they wanted to hide it from the law and that Pichai knew about it.
By the way, because Google tried so hard to make Google Plus work, it’s possible that your Google account — if you have one — is a Google Plus profile. You can disconnect it; Google calls it “downgrading”.
Has anyone made this point yet? Pichai refused to testify to congress because he couldn’t. He would have either had to perjure himself or reveal this bug in real time before the committee.
Update (2018-10-10): Matt Haughey:
I’ll never forget when I was on Google’s campus in 2011 and a product team told me as much as I loved Google Reader, Google+ was going to replace it with something much better.
Update (2018-10-15): Morgan Knutson:
Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.
See also: Eli Schiff, Threader, and John Gruber.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
> chose not to report it because of fear of “immediate regulatory interest” that would lump Google in with Facebook
FFS, what is wrong with these people.
About G+, this has been pretty obvious to anyone who was still using it for at least half a year now. Google did nothing to stop the constant stream of spam, and about half a year ago, search broke, and was never fixed. It's too bad, since G+ was a good system for some communities. But if you don't own your community, that's what you get eventually, always.
