Thanks for the memories, even though they weren’t so great.

As Facebook will probably attest to, running a social media site is not easy. That being said, Google’s venture into the social network scene has come to an uninspiring end. Eight years after its launch, Google is finally pulling the plug on its social network. You might have noticed that there is no more Google+ sign in buttons. Even your profile is now wiped off the face of the interweb.

Designed to take on Facebook, Google+ never reached the same heights and always had to settle for living in it’s shadow. Regardless, this was probably a difficult decision for Google to make. The company has always had big aspirations for the platform, and it actually led to a couple of pretty useful Google spin offs such as hangouts and Google Photos.

Doomed from the start

In spite of this though, it’s low usage and security issues is what eventually led to its downfall. People just weren’t making the jump from Facebook. To be fair, it didnt help that in its early days, Google gave no choice to its consumers on whether or not they even wanted a Google+ account. The company made it compulsory to create an account if you want to make comments on its other services such as YouTube and even went as far to implicate Google+ in the account creation process of Gmail. Bad move. As Apple and U2 found out a couple of years later, force feeding consumers with stuff they don’t want will only alienate them. Shooting itself in the foot at the beginning, Google+ was never going to catch up with facebook.

Turning into a security liability was probably the icing on the Google+ euthanasia cake. Late last year, it was reported that around half a million profiles were affected by a data-exposing bug. Google promptly came out to say that there is no evidence of malicious use of that data. In spite of this, the company still announced that it was about time to put the platform out of its misery and set its termination date for August 2019. It didn’t even make it that far. In December 2018, it suffered another security issue, a much more significant one with 52.5 million users being affected. Increasingly becoming a liability, the Google pulled the plug 4 months early.

Good riddance?

All that being said, Google+ wasn’t necessarily a bad platform. I think we’ve all tried it out in its early days and it had some pretty interesting concepts such as Circles, which is basically the OG version of “Close Friends” on Instagram. Add that to the aforementioned Google Hangouts and Google Photos, both of which are undoubted successes and you actually have what seems like a solid social media platform. There are even a few niche groups who would attest to this.

Death is always shocking because of how abrupt it is. In the case of Google+, it’s been on life support for years. I’m pretty sure that both consumers and the people at Google will be breathing a sigh of relief now that its finally gone.