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This week, Google announced that consumers known as Google Plus – its attempt to optimize Facebook and Twitter on social networks – would quietly enter this good night of next August. (An enterprise version will still exist.) A data breach on the platform, the New York Times reported that it was bad enough that the company's engineers decided that keeping Plus Plus alive was not worth it. Vice President of Engineering, Ben Smith, Google's Vice President of Engineering, writes that "the consumer version of Google+ currently has no vulnerable data and has not exposed any vulnerable data. . commitment: 90% of Google+ user sessions last less than five seconds. "
So, how are you. In the eyes of the competition, Google Plus had died on arrival in the summer of 2011: it was the fourth (fourth!) Enterprise foray into social networks, difficult to use and to understand, and she did not seem to have any purpose beyond Google claiming to have even more space online. (Example: in 2014, The New York Times More than 540 million monthly active users have been reported by Plus, but nearly half of them have not even visited the site.) Over the last seven years, the service has been became totally different from what it was in the beginning: Hangouts, Streams and Photos were: divided into separate products in 2015 – before becoming the digital ghost town that is the current incarnation.
But for some, it was at home.
"I'll be sad to see it disappear," said Dan Woods, who works for Mentally Friendly, a Sydney-based design agency based in Canberra. The edge in an email. At first, he liked Plus because his mobile application for photos was good: "It offered a non-destructive editing, a fuzzy search and most of the features that had been in Photos since 2013," he explains.
Another draw: Plus circles, the way the product has grouped people together. "I've also liked sharing with a fairly large group of people (friends of friends) without this being public by default," Woods continues. "The metaphor of the circles that g + launched with seemed to me to be too complex a solution to a very real problem that no other social networking site has ever solved since (how do you disseminate significantly to very different audiences without different accounts?). "
More had apparently been conceived to solve this problem of collapse of the context: the circles mentioned by Woods regrouped different types of relations (vaguely evoking the spheres, or "spaces of coexistence", described at the end of the 90s and at the beginning of the years 2000 by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk). A circle may contain your closest friends, while another may be for your family. Google Plus makes it easy to share different messages to each group. "Now that the service has been largely forgotten, people who continue to post on g + do so mainly with small communities (eg, trey or wayne or paul ford shitposting)," continues Woods. "As far as I know, it's essentially troll-free and conversations tend to be slower and wider than those of their Twitter counterparts."
Other users are not willing to give up without a fight. Some users have launched Change.org petitions; to date, more than 22,800 signatures have been received. Lizzy, the woman who launched this petition, writes that she created her not to lose the friends she met on Plus. "I spend most of my time on Google Plus and I do not know what I would do without it," she continues. Many other people gave similar reasons for signing the petition. "I have been on this site since 2k13. google + is a home for me and i can not imagine without g +. I made great friends here[[[[sic], "Wrote the user # swaggin out." "This is the only social media platform I appreciate," said Mike Kuzmitsky, user. "This may not be a extraordinary site, but IT DAMN really wants to, so why should I move? "asked the user Buruburedo Boudreaux.
Gary Suarez, songwriter of music, considers More as a tool to improve his rankings in Google searches and to increase the visibility of the stories he publishes. He began experimenting with this software while working in book publishing, an industry that was eager to try new products that could help make their books better known.
"We were establishing a presence on Twitter, using Facebook and starting to understand video content," Suarez said. The edge. "[Then] Google Plus suddenly appears. "They did not know anything about it, but it seemed to be important. was Google, and this could help with the search.
"More than anything else, we [were] to have the impression that if we [used] Google Plus [we’d] to be rewarded in one way or another on google.com "in the search rankings, he says, by comparing how Facebook improves the ranking of Facebook links on its platform. (Technically, at its peak , Google+ was frequently used by businesses, writers, and bloggers to improve their SEO.)
"I want to emphasize that I never really have [used] Google Plus as a social media platform, "says Suarez. "It looked a lot like a place to share content and drive someone else." Although he claims to have never really seen anything more to do for the stories that he had. He promoted, he was superstitious and he still uses the service today. More paranoia than anything. "You know, as people have small habits – they only go through the same turnstile every day to go to work, and they usually change in one way or another. another, it could perhaps change things negatively for them. " Nevertheless, he adds: "I do not think I'll miss it.
After Facebook's dominance of the social Internet in the late 2000s, it became much harder to launch new social media services because most network users had already been satisfied (and trained) with Facebook. Anyone who wanted to face the competition had to stand out and then fight against the relentless acquisitions of Facebook and its aggressive product team. One by one, new startups were launched and then summarily drawn from the sky – by acquisition, by non-existent user bases, by too slow growth. Peach, MySpace and even Twitter from Vine have been there; R.I.P., all of you fallen soldiers.
And that's the way social networking services end: somewhere between a bang and a groan. In many other comments relating to Lizzy's Change.org petition, people have reiterated that Google Plus was superior to Facebook – because it lacked the drama of the biggest platform, because it did not want go to Facebook, or more simply, Moreover, it was where their friends were.
Scrolling through the thousands of comments is strange, because it shows that even social communities neglected by engineers and administrators can thrive – but that's also instructive, as this same scrolling also reveals the purpose of a social network: a space for people to connect. This is more important to users than rounds of financing, the number of monthly active users or growth. The remaining communities of Google Plus could even be healthier than their counterparts in Facebook and Twitter – well, healthier apart from their inevitable racists, who are at least relatively curled up by the smaller, more concentrated circles of Plus. As we have seen on other platforms, connecting the world may not have been such an ambitious goal.
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