After a slow battle with the internet, Google Plus passed on October 8th, 2018 at the age of 7.
Google + was born on 28th June 2011 in Mountain View, California to search engine giant, Google LLC. With the vision of a connected world neatly organized into circles of friends, Google + set out to compete against the social media network Facebook. After racking up apparently 90 million users, the “virtual ghost town” was seeing a dramatic lack of engagement and made a series of appointments to pinpoint a diagnosis. In 2015, Google Plus went through treatment to eliminate the requirement to use a plus account when signing on to other Google services such as YouTube in hopes of increasing engagement.
A close review of all Google + APIs back in March 2018 uncovered a bug in the Google Plus People APIs that potentially affected 500,000 accounts on the platform. While it has been since patched, the breach has revealed significant challenges in creating as well as maintaining a successful media platform that meets user expectations. These challenges and low usage has ultimately led to the sun setting on this branch of the Google family tree.
A 10-month wind-down has been arranged for those more active users to migrate their data and the funeral service will be held privately amongst a small circle of family and friends in California.