Our Final Goodbye To Google Plus

Google+ plus has officially ended eight years after its launch, Google has decided to finally pull the plug on its social network. It was designed to take on Facebook but, despite the company's efforts, it always existed in its shadow. As of today, there will be no more Google+ sign-in buttons, no more pages or comments, and your account will simply vanish.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to Gmail users because Google had  sent several emails to gmail users before now, informing them that Google+ would not exist anymore by April 2019.

It was undoubtedly, a difficult decision for Google to make. When the G+ arrived in 2011, the company had major aspirations for the platform. And truly, it gave birth to a couple of successful Google products that continue to have a major impact on social media.  In 2013, the company developed Hangouts, its video chat feature, into its own messaging platform -- a space occupied at the time solely by Skype.

Next, there was another Google+ spinoff: Which was Photos. it suddenly got very easy to upload, share and store all your pictures. Google+ focused on the idea of communities long before Facebook made its push for Groups, and let you organize your contacts into Circles long before Instagram rolled out its "Close Friends" feature.

None of this was enough to keep the troubled platform afloat still. it simply never resonated with users the way Facebook did. Indeed, In 2018, Google revealed that 90-percent of Google+ user sessions were ending within five seconds. Compare that with recent figures for Facebook, which actually did put the average time spent per visit at 20 minutes, and the disparity is obvious. 

However, the last reason why the company decided to shut down Google+ was its security -- or lack thereof. This was a very notable issue which was much of a concern. In October 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that some half a million profiles were affected by a data-exposing bug between 2015 and March 2018. While the company said there was no evidence of that data being used maliciously, it decided it was as good a time as any to shutter the platform altogether, choosing to put it out of its misery altogether. 

Initially , it's termination date was set to August 2019, but in December 2018 another security issue came to light. Which was a much more significant one at the time which affected up to 52.5 million users. Again, there was no evidence that exposed data had been improperly used, but that point became the final straw for the company, They decided to permanently end it as quick as possible before any further issues arises, which led to the proposed shutdown date cut down by four months, giving users and moderators just enough time to download their data.