Google+ and life after death social media

After being challenged for failing to talk to the world about a security problem, Google said that it was finally going to drop Google+, its well – designed but unpopular social network, which was valiantly trying to crack down on Google. attack on Facebook.

This shutdown comes after Google was forced to recognize his discovery and have corrected in March a security breach that may have exposed the personal data of 500,000 users Google+. Google has been silent about the problem for months and is back on track after a report released Monday by the Wall Street Journal. Google then decided not to disclose the problem because it did not respect the internal "thresholds" to alert the public.

This is the end of a long and difficult road for Google+ that started with a lot of fanfare when it was launched in 2011. However, even though the network has always been praised for its sleek interface and its photo features useful, it has never been sufficiently threatened by Facebook. , the largest social media network in the world with over 2 billion users.

So now, Google+, long described as a ghost town, is bulldozed for failing to follow the code.

But his story has no clear end, at least not yet. The disappearance of Google+ raises issues that we have not yet had to deal with on this scale in modern technology: when a large social network is closed, what happens next? Google said the service would slowly cease in the next 10 months, before ending in August, to give users time to transfer their information and photos off-line.

Of course, Google+ is not the first social network to fail. There was Friendster and MySpace, but they burned in an earlier era, before the era of social media that consumes everything we live now. Friendster closed in 2015 after a brief pivot in the games. Technically, MySpace still exists, even if it is positioned as a music site. Vine, the network owned by Twitter for the 6-second video loops, announced it was shut down in 2016. This decision was deeply regretted and most of its users migrated to Instagram and YouTube.

This is different. Google+ originally had to be an alternative to the giant that is Facebook. This has failed dramatically, but it is a major social network of one of the most powerful societies on the planet. It's a social network that announces his death at a time when we are so entrenched in social media that we may be choking on us. About 77% of the US population has a social network profile, according to Statista. We relied so heavily on the social media mechanisms that they brought us misinformation, division, electoral interference, and misuse of data.

Thus, the death of one of these services, even if little used, can be good news for some. But that does not make it any less shocking.

"Part of your life, or the way you chose to present it, will disappear," says Brian Solis, analyst at Altimeter Group. "There is no real understanding of what this is going to mean."

Google declined to comment on this story.

The SoundCloud fright

SoundCloud is the biggest scare we've had about a popular social networking site. The German site allows musicians, signed and unsigned, to download their music and share it with a community of fans. It is an integral part of the atmosphere that it has become a pleasure for people to distribute their SoundCloud links to everyone who takes them.

Last year, the company laid off 40% of its staff, followed by reports that SoundCloud only had enough funding to survive for 80 days.

Internet immediately panicked. Chance the Rapper, an avid user, tweeted: "I'm working on the SoundCloud thing."

The service was finally saved thanks to emergency venture capital funding, and its CEO, Alex Ljung, retired. (It's unclear what role Chance played the rapper, although he tweeted, he had a "fruitful call" with Ljung.)

Nevertheless, the idea of ​​losing SoundCloud sparked reflections on the instability of online communities.

"The moral of his struggle is clear," wrote the New York Times. "As digital culture becomes more and more tied to the success of the platforms it flourishes on, it's always going to go away forever."

Power users

For most people who had forgotten Google+ a few years ago, the closure could be anti-climatic. We have many other options to feed our social media solution, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest. (While it's prudent to browse your Google+ profile to see if there are gems or content that deserves to be backed up.)

But the fact that Google+ has primarily become a staple does not mean that it has been completely abandoned. It is difficult to determine the exact number of users because Google would have counted the number of people using the social features of the network in its products. In 2015, an external researcher estimated that 111 million active profiles.

Google has refused to share the numbers of social network users, at its peak or at the present time. But earlier this week, the company said that 90% of Google+ sessions had lasted less than five seconds.

"Google did not give us a reason to use Google+," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. "Facebook was good enough to satisfy what we needed in social media."

Yet, like any service, he had his users with power. The service is popular among photographers because of its renowned photo features, such as storage and editing capabilities. Daniel Radcliffe, or Harry Potter himself, is a dedicated user. This is his only verified social media account, although his subscriber account on the site is not listed.

Radcliffe said that the reason he loves him so much is in fact the lack of commitment. "It's something I can do that does not contain any comments or things," he said in 2016. (Asked to be interviewed for this story, a representative of Radcliffe refused, claiming that the actor was busy focusing on his new Broadway play opening next week.)

Then there is Guy Kawasaki, the Apple Evangelist for the original Macintosh. It has nearly 7 million followers on Google+, compared to 1.46 million on Twitter and 430,000 on Facebook. The day the search giant announced his stop, he wrote on his page: "What the Plus?" and added, "I've seen great potential in Google+." He even signed a petition on Change.org asking Google not to close it.

For people like him – public figures and speakers – the end of a platform is a tough one. This is a particularly hard blow for people who tout their cumulative accounts among the accounts of many social networks, for example for concerts. Trying to replicate his audience on other platforms is out of the question, Kawasaki said.

"It's impossible," he says. "I wake up tomorrow and I tell myself that I'm going to have 7 million new subscribers on Facebook or Twitter, you show me how to do that without buying them – and I do not buy subscribers."

In the end, he says, Google+ was not a priority for a company as big as Google. Alphabet, its parent company, is already involved in everything from research to e-mail to driverless cars. The social network, which languished constantly, was therefore indispensable.

"I'll miss it," says Kawasaki. "It was an excellent experience."

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