Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over.<p>The idea of &quot;circles&quot;, where you had a circle for &quot;acquaintances&quot; &quot;friends&quot;, &quot;family&quot; would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances.<p>Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe&#x2F;unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.

RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element&#x2F;social psychology angle.<p>Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world.<p>This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone.<p>Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.

This is Vic Gundotra&#x27;s legacy and perhaps the first major strategic decision Larry Page made in the post-Eric Schmidt era and it was the design and launch of Google+ and (IMHO) it marked a turning point in the company&#x27;s culture.<p>Internal resistance to aspects of G+ was enormous. People outside the company get this idea that Google acts as some kind of singleminded (possibly nefarious) entity when &quot;herding cats&quot; is so often much closer to the truth. In G+&#x27;s case, the rank-and-file was largely against things like the Real Names policy yet leadership went ahead with it anyway (Vic often quipped that you didn&#x27;t want everyone named &quot;Dog fart&quot;, which was a pretty ridiculous argument).<p>And while it may have been Vic driving this, Larry backed him so has to bear shared responsibility.<p>Probably the worst decision made in this whole mess was (again, IMHO) trying to unify the account model. Youtube accounts have different permission models to Gmail accounts, etc. It would&#x27;ve been sufficient to simply link them (and not require they be linked) rather than jamming single-sign-on down everyone&#x27;s throats, which really gained nothing except a lot of user backlash.<p>The worst part of this was that the for the longest time some policy violation (like your name not being &quot;real&quot;) could lock you out of your entire account. Whoever made this decision needed to be fired. Deciding someone&#x27;s name wasn&#x27;t real enough should NEVER lock you out of your Gmail (or Youtube or any other service).<p>I was reminded of this in a thread yesterday about the disaster that was the Snapchat redesign. Leadership ignoring user feedback as people start to attribute luck to skill and vision (people have a tendency to socialize losses and privatize wins). Is this merely hubris? Because it&#x27;s very reminiscent of the dismissal of internal feedback that is now routine (at Google).<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate how much Google-hate is on HN these days because I think it&#x27;s largely unjustified. There are definitely some bad (IMHO) leadership decisions but the rank-and-file are still culture carriers for a lot of the things that made Google great.<p>Still, as the Chinese say, the fish rots from the head.<p>Disclaimer: Xoogler. All opinions are entirely personal and I don&#x27;t speak for this or any other company.<p>EDIT: TIL the origin of &quot;a fish rots from the head&quot; is disputed and possibly Turkish not Chinese: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phrases.org.uk&#x2F;meanings&#x2F;fish-rot-from-the-head-down.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phrases.org.uk&#x2F;meanings&#x2F;fish-rot-from-the-head-d...</a>

I used G+ a lot a few years back, and I did dozens of posts of logs of projects and so on... and then one day I wanted to refer to one of them to someone and discovered you can&#x27;t <i>search you own posts</i>.<p>That immediately stopped me posted anything. It&#x27;s almost write-once, read never sort of medium. It&#x27;s too bad, there were a few good ideas and so on, and I had a bit of traction of a few good &#x27;circles&#x27; but I&#x27;m pretty sure that like me, everyone else stopped.<p>Now, I have to figure out a way of re-importing all that content to something else, probably homebrewed this time.<p><i>IN FACT</i> I&#x27;ve just checked, and G+ seems to have forgotten <i>every single post I&#x27;ve made, but one</i>. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;+MichelPollet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;+MichelPollet</a><p>EDIT: Now the posts are back. I must have been archived on CDs or something ;-)

packets to packets, bits to bits.<p>I am not surprised they are killing the service, and I&#x27;m reminded of all the damage it did to the company both inside and out[1]. If there is one thing I could say I miss about not working at Google it is seeing how the organization internalizes what they did and why. These sorts of things can teach a lot of really good lessons to an organization if the retrospective is done well.<p>I was also thinking about the recent love letter to Google that came across here about Google Cloud. In it was the admission that Google tried to hard to &quot;copy&quot; or &quot;follow&quot; AWS in the early years.<p>Allo, Inbox, Gchat, Reader, Wave, Etc. It feels like they are trying to hard to be &quot;amazing&quot; and missing out on just being good at what they do. Meanwhile the beat of the jungle drums, &quot;More ads, more ads, more ads...&quot; continues on relentlessly.<p>[1] Inside there were good projects that got killed because they either conflicted with or competed with G+, outside the company it seemed Google was deathly afraid of Facebook and Twitter and had no credible answer, their real names fiasco, their forcing of people to use G+ if they used other services, all of it damaged the Google brand and user trust.

What&#x27;s really striking about this to me is that Google didn&#x27;t disclose the security vulnerability. Google is trying to cover it up by moving the ball from &#x27;there was a breach&#x27; to &#x27;we&#x27;re shutting down G+&#x27;. This is why I&#x27;m super hesitant to be a Google fanboy. Facebook may have my social media info, but Google has my emails, all of my mobile data, access to a bunch of my assets through Google Domains, GCE etc. Scary stuff.

LOL, one more example of why one should never depend on anything from Google.<p><i>developer adoption</i><p>Gee, I wonder why? Maybe because they never released a usable write API and were basically just a little less developer-hostile than Twitter?<p>G+ had a lot of potential, had Google chosen to truly embrace Open Standards, federation, and usable API&#x27;s. As it is, they shot themselves in the foot by creating JAWG (Just Another Walled Garden).<p>Anyway, maybe this will just help prod more people to join the Fediverse.

G+ didn&#x27;t even get its own sunset announcement post; it was mentioned in passing from a post about _something else_.<p>Poor G+.

Number of project failures and cuts under Larry Page is just amazing. Normally you would expect that founder CEO insist on long term vision and loves to go after big bets. Under Larry Page, X had been cut. Boston Dynamics was lost. Robotics effort was shutdown. And now G+. After all these time <i>no one</i> at Google&#x27;s highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social. This is at the time FB is bleeding heavily, is losing trust and people are willing to try something new. Google is one case where it looks like outside traditional CEO Eric Schmidt did much much better not only in operational excellence but also long term big bets including maps, gmail, YouTube, Android etc. Larry Page has nothing comparable to show for in his 7 years of leadership. This might be one reason: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;features&#x2F;2018-09-13&#x2F;larry-page-is-a-no-show-with-google-under-a-harsh-spotlight?srnd=technology-vp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;features&#x2F;2018-09-13&#x2F;larry-pag...</a>

Related discussion here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18169027" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18169027</a>.<p>Edit: here are some other articles providing coverage:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;8&#x2F;17951914&#x2F;google-plus-data-breach-exposed-user-profile-information-privacy-not-disclosed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;8&#x2F;17951914&#x2F;google-plus-data...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-reportedly-exposed-private-data-of-at-least-hundreds-of-thousands-of-plus-users.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-reportedly-exposed-pr...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-plus-hack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-plus-hack&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-45792349" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-45792349</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;variety.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;digital&#x2F;news&#x2F;google-plus-shut-down-1202972233&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;variety.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;digital&#x2F;news&#x2F;google-plus-shut-down-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;tech-news&#x2F;google-says-it-found-security-flaw-march-chose-not-tell-n917846" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;tech-news&#x2F;google-says-it-found-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;google-shutters-google-social-network-after-wsj-reports-a-huge-security-lapse-2018-10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;google-shutters-google-socia...</a>

Do we get the + operator back in search ?

&gt; Google is shutting down its long-neglected Facebook competitor Google+ following the disclosure of a vulnerability that could have resulted in third-party developers accessing private data from around 500,000 users, the company announced Monday.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;variety.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;digital&#x2F;news&#x2F;google-plus-shut-down-1202972233&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;variety.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;digital&#x2F;news&#x2F;google-plus-shut-down-...</a>

Funny how they low-key slip through, the fact that they had an open security vulnerability for 3 years. Like &quot;Hey, we are shutting down Google+ ... Btw, your data may have or may have not been exposed...&quot;

This sucks. The vibrant RPG community on Google+ is in uproar about this and looking for a suitable alternative. (MeWe looks like the most likely candidate at the moment.)<p>Google+ started out as the best social network. Unfortunately Google has taken every opportunity to ruin it, remove popular features, force ill-considered integration, remove that integration once people are used to it. Lately the spam filtering has been utterly broken, alternating between leaving painfully obvious spam, and marking and hiding comments from people you were following. It seemed like it was an experimental testbed for them where they didn&#x27;t care if people were using it.<p>Despite all of that, we hung on because of the great communities, the people we got to know, and because frankly there&#x27;s no good alternative.<p>It really seems to me it shouldn&#x27;t be too hard at this point to design a sane social network. Google+ had all the elements, but refused to apply them correctly.<p>Facebook is a horrible mess of privacy violations with no control over your feed (though G+&#x27;s control often doesn&#x27;t work as intended either), and besides, there&#x27;s family and co-workers there. Twitter seems designed for screaming into the void. Tumbler and Instagram don&#x27;t seem to be my thing.

The reports of Google avoiding making a security disclosure about the potential data breach out of concern for negative PR and regulatory response are very concerning and should be getting more attention

Google+ was a top-down, scrambling response to Facebook&#x27;s meteoric rise. I think it ultimately failed because it didn&#x27;t naturally mesh with or arise from Google&#x27;s natural strengths.<p>Google has always had amazing scientists and engineers working for them, but building a new social network requires less math&#x2F;science and more of a human focus. (Of course, Facebook&#x27;s data centers and ops are now the 6th wonder of the tech world, but that came later.)

Lots of people here talking about the good bits of Google+ or how they could have made it succeed. But from my POV it was just the wrong idea from the start. From what I saw Google panicked about the growth of Facebook and Twitter and tried to build a competitor. But no one wanted more social networks. And Google didn’t have a compelling story about how they were better. Instead it was just a bunch of user hostile changes—forced linking of accounts, elimination of stuff like Reader—and Google seemed to be forcing itself into parts of your digital life where it wasn’t welcome. I’m glad they’re able to admit it’s a failure now even though it took several years too long and this silly excuse about a privacy review.

Google+ sunsetting is sad news, as I&#x27;ve actually used it fairly actively. (and I have a few dozens of people I interact regularly who I wouldn&#x27;t have known if not from G+!)<p>It somewhat acted like a better version of Twitter for me, where I can write a lot more on the post, and actually engage a meaningful discussion with people.<p>I don&#x27;t know, even with relaxed character counts on Twitter that it will accommodate same use cases, and I don&#x27;t like to use Facebook for this purpose as I really don&#x27;t want introduce a total stranger as my friend...

It&#x27;s going to be very interesting to see where all the tabletop gaming people land. G+ got a lot of pickup in that hobby because the early API blended tools, like Hangouts with overlays and easily segmented discussion groups, that worked well with online tabletop gaming. Roll20 integrated well with G+ (at least until Google killed the Hangouts API in April 2017).<p>The early adopters reached enough of a critical mass that others used it solely because of who was already there, making it an actual social network for at least that purpose.<p>Much like when Reader folded, G+&#x27;s critical mass is going to spread out to a half-dozen other places and refragment. And like Reader&#x27;s exit, there&#x27;s a vacuum right now for someone to jump in with something better and charge a nominal amount for it.

From my perspective, the one thing Google got _really_ wrong with G+ was their APIs. When G+ was launched, tools like TweetDeck were heavily used for interacting with Twitter, Facebook and the like. All of a sudden along came a service that had no APIs by which you could post to it. Something you needed to specifically go and open a separate application for.<p>If they&#x27;d made public read &amp; write APIs from the start, they could have picked up a massive initial user base as people used the tools they were already actively using. You&#x27;ve got to either:<p>1) Offer an amazingly compelling product with features that provide _significant_ reasons for people to compel people to use you<p>2) Go to where people are, and bring them to you.<p>G+ failed on both scores. It had good features, but they weren&#x27;t _that_ compelling.

The best thing to ever come out of Google+ is this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;LTq8TrA3hb4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;LTq8TrA3hb4</a>

The post says they don&#x27;t have evidence of anyone using the api that leaked all that personal info - let&#x27;s not ignore that: name, picture, birthdate, email was just open to the world for a friend lookup! Second, they don&#x27;t clarify if this is &quot;evidence of absence&quot; of a leak. Do they not monitor that api call but they don&#x27;t have any reason to expect a problem? Or is it that they monitor it and no one used it in the &quot;bad way&quot;? I&#x27;m afraid it must be the first - if they had evidence no one ever use the api, they&#x27;d be explicit about it.

<i>People are finally becoming dis-enchanted with Facebook. Quick, kill Google+!</i><p>As opposed to trying to take advantage of the opportunity and improve it -- fixing the bork-headed management design shoved onto it prior to external launch.<p>Facebook has shown how it&#x27;s failing its users. Google has the opportunity to make a big show and potentially market share gain by doing the opposite. But, nope.<p>Instead, &#x27;our market share is corporate&#x27;.<p>Which is fine. But, it tells you a lot about where Google has been going.<p>(And, if I were corporate Worldmerica, I&#x27;d be hesitant about investing too much good will in and dependence upon +.)<p>As an individual Google user, unfortunately I have little hope that this unwinding will also back out other changes co-morbid with the + deployment, such as the account &quot;unification&quot; that allows a single &quot;mistake&quot; to lock you out of everything. And a single Google &quot;mistake&quot; in execution to haunt you across all their properties.<p>I&#x27;m in the process of exiting Facebook, except for a mostly placeholder presence. A lot of my friends don&#x27;t have the wherewithal to set up and maintain privately implemented social presences. But, we won&#x27;t be switching to +, I guess.<p>Maybe an old-fashioned bulletin board -- with otherwise unlinked pseudonyms -- will do. Back to the Future...<p>As I think about this, maybe there is a strongly implied message in this. Assuming parts of Google still emit good will. Namely, that, these days, <i>NO</i> commercial network can escape the pressures -- governmental as well as commercial -- to compromise their users.<p><i>We aren&#x27;t making it, because we can no longer do so honestly and securely.</i><p>An interesting alternative perspective.<p><i>(And, we&#x27;re even less inclined than Mark and Co., to try to ride herd on all the nut jobs out there.)</i>

Google is wrapping a breach disclosure in a press release for new services and you&#x27;re all glossing right over the breach. Just sayin&#x27;...

What exactly does &quot;sunsetting consumer Google+&quot; mean? The blog post wasn&#x27;t particularly enlightening. Are they shutting down Google+ as a social network?

I like that there are also some privacy improvements in Android permissions mentioned in this post: &quot;We are limiting apps’ ability to receive Call Log and SMS permissions on Android devices, and are no longer making contact interaction data available via the Android Contacts API.&quot;

&quot;it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption&quot;<p>I bet G+ has more active users than your average indie developer could ever dream about. But Google is not that kind of company. It&#x27;s all or nothing. World domination or shut it down and try again (or buy a company that succeeded).

Shutting down consumer Google+ is the least important part of this post. Hardly anyone used that. The privacy changes they are making for everything else are much more important. More granular control of app permissions is a big deal.<p>Overall I&#x27;m not sure how to feel because I didn&#x27;t realize how bad it was. How many apps have required access to my contacts for legitimate reasons, and I wasn&#x27;t aware I was providing access to our interaction data?<p>&gt; Finding 4: When users grant SMS, Contacts and Phone permissions to Android apps, they do so with certain use cases in mind.<p>&gt; Action 4: We are limiting apps’ ability to receive Call Log and SMS permissions on Android devices, and are no longer making contact interaction data available via the Android Contacts API.

I wonder what G+ could have done to pivot after its terrible release. They had some good ideas, and usually Google takes those good ideas of a failed product and rolls it into successful products. Remember Google Wave, where you could work on a document _at the same time_?<p>Something like the automatic generation of circles in Google Mail, and integrate some kind of generalized wall posts for Google Mail users.

Google+ always reminds me of my favorite management quote: &quot;The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems.&quot; [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sgaumc.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;files_library&#x2F;technical_vs_adaptive_challenges.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sgaumc.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;files_library&#x2F;technical_vs_adap...</a>

A Google+ private community allows social, collaborative photo sharing photos with friends <i>with login required</i>. This is not supported in Google Photos! With Photos shared albums you can select people with whom to share, but those people just get an email with a secret token embedded in a URL -- aside from trusting your non-technical friends not to accidentally leak this URL, there is no way to know who is viewing the photos or remove access from specific individuals. I really hope the Photos team upgrades their shared album permission model now that the alternative in Google+ has been sunsetted.

I didn&#x27;t see this sentiment expressed elsewhere in this comment section, so I&#x27;ll express it : G+ was overrun by vapid, spam-crazy self-promoters and for me, it quickly got too annoying to use [say, in 2012 or so]. Every time I logged in, I had to winnow them out of the list of connection requests, which was a time-eater especially if I&#x27;d been to a large gathering or something lately. &quot;Lessee... Dave Stevens... did I meet him at that thing last week or something?... no, just another &#x27;rock star&#x27; to delete...&quot;

The legendary Facebook killer, by the name of G+, here&#x27;s a list of products it successfully killed:<p>- Google Reader<p>- Google Buzz<p>- iGoogle<p>- Picasa Web Albums<p>- Google Talk<p>- Google Latitude<p>- Google Wave<p>Now the latest victim was added to the list:<p>- Google+

Where will Linus Torvalds blog now?

Good, the only time I end up there is by mistake when trying to do something else.

....did Google just admit to patching a security hole and not announcing it for months? Isn&#x27;t this what they continuously harangue other organizations for on Google&#x27;s Project Zero blog?<p>Yep: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;tech-news&#x2F;google-says-it-found-security-flaw-march-chose-not-tell-n917846" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;tech-news&#x2F;google-says-it-found-...</a><p>&quot;As many as 438 applications might have used the API. Google maintains that it didn’t uncover evidence developers were aware of or abused the security flaw, or that profile data was misused. However, <i>it acknowledged that it has no way of knowing for sure because it doesn’t have “audit rights” over its developers and because it keeps a limited set of activity logs.</i>&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-security-breach&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;google-security-breach&#x2F;</a>)<p>Google wrote: “Our Privacy &amp; Data Protection Office reviewed this issue, looking at the type of data involved, <i>whether we could accurately identify the users to inform</i>, <i>whether there was any evidence of misuse</i>, and <i>whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response</i>. None of these thresholds were met in this instance.”<p>--<p>From 2016: <i>&quot;The search engine company publicised a critical Windows bug 10 days after informing the software firm about it&quot;</i> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;nov&#x2F;01&#x2F;google-microsoft-bug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;nov&#x2F;01&#x2F;google-mi...</a>)<p>From February: <i>&quot;Microsoft misses Google&#x27;s 90-day deadline, so Google has published details of an exploit mitigation bypass&quot;</i> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;windows-10-security-google-exposes-how-malicious-sites-can-exploit-microsoft-edge&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;windows-10-security-google-exp...</a>)<p>And then: <i>&quot;For the second time in a week, Google reveals another unpatched Windows 10 vulnerability&quot;</i> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;windows-10-bug-google-again-reveals-code-for-important-unpatched-flaw&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;windows-10-bug-google-again-re...</a>)<p>In August: <i>&quot;Google discloses vulnerability in Fortnite launcher that allowed possible malware installation&quot;</i> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-08-27-google-discloses-vulnerability-in-fortnite-launcher-that-allowed-possible-malware-installation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-08-27-google-dis...</a>)<p>Again in August, reporting Samsung bugs: (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;google-project-zero-heres-the-secret-to-flagging-up-bugs-before-hackers-find-them&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;google-project-zero-heres-the-...</a>):<p><i>&quot;Two terms irked her and simply clashed with Project Zero&#x27;s practices. &quot;You MUST hold off disclosing the vulnerability in reasonable time, and you MUST get Samsung&#x27;s consent or inform Samsung about the date before disclosing the vulnerability,&quot; said Samsung. &quot;In some cases, Samsung may request not to disclose the vulnerability at all.&quot; Again, this clashes with Project Zero&#x27;s insistence on disclosure.&quot; </i>

The use of the word &quot;sunset&quot; as a verb in posts like this is fucking infuriating. Yes, software types know what it means, but this is a consumer product with tens of millions of users, who have no familiarity with that term.<p>It&#x27;s a weasel word. The way to say this is in plain English. We&#x27;re closing, shutting down, turning off, discontinuing, or something.

I recently started getting friend requests on Youtube (I didn&#x27;t know it had such a feature!).<p>Does this mean they are just shifting the social network features over to other products?

I wonder if we&#x27;ll get the + operator back in search now. Google broke a lot of things across their ecosystem with the release of Google+. I feel that the effect on search kickstarted the trend of taking away search control from the user and isolating us in bubbles (circles).

So it&#x27;s remaining as a product for enterprise customers. Does this mean every enterprise instance will have it&#x27;s own instance of g+, or will they be able to interact with other enterprises? And will I be able to move my profile from domain to domain if I move companies?

A curiously soft end given all of the (IMO valid) outrage about “real names” when it was first announced.

Perhaps this means someday required search terms can work +this +way +again.

Google + was one of those ideas that probably would have done significantly better had Google not been so forceful at getting people to use it. Yes, I get that it&#x27;s hard to overcome the network effect thing and that fighting Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;whatever head on would have been tough, but giving people the option to sign in&#x2F;link accounts probably would have done a lot more for adoption and caused less of a backlash than Google&#x27;s actual methods did.<p>&#x27;Use this service&#x2F;product because you now have to in order to access something you like&#x27; is not a good way to endear your company&#x2F;service&#x2F;product to users, and usually has the exact opposite effect to whatever you were intending.

Until recently Google+ suffered from being a virtual black hole of information due to a lackluster search interface (oh the irony). In addition it had poor anti-spam and limited moderation controls, leading to almost daily NSFW images in my stream.<p>Then recently they tried to make it better by redesigning it, and apparently gave some graphic designers free reign. This lead to a <i>significantly</i> worse user experience, so much so that I and many others who were still clinging on stopped using it almost entirely.<p>That said it had some good ideas, and the signal-to-noise ratio was much better than on Facebook. I&#x27;m guessing the active communities I visited will migrate to Facebook or similar, but it won&#x27;t be quite the same.

They did this with Google Reader 5 years ago. I don&#x27;t think you can trust the longevity of Google services beyond GMail and Google Search.

I wonder if Project Strobe is also behind Google&#x27;s recent effort to limit the permissions of Chrome extensions. So far I&#x27;m really liking the direction they&#x27;re taking with this; making permissions optional and more fine-grained.

So many &quot;social&quot; systems have gone down the same path to collapse:<p>- Create a way to communicate with your friends.<p>- Try to monetize it by adding feeds of ads and irrelevant junk.<p>- Users get annoyed.<p>- Double down on the ads.<p>- More users get annoyed and leave.<p>- Usage shrinks.<p>This used to be called &quot;pulling a Myspace&quot;. Since then, Twitter, Google+, WeChat in India, and Facebook have followed Myspace&#x27;s lead.<p>It works out OK for the founders if they cash out around step 3.

I still don&#x27;t understand why G+ never caught on. For me FB is wayyyy too busy with panes and club, and groups, and businesses, and news, and election interference, and the bird site at 140, and now at 280 was just not enough. I always found G+ to be the perfect balance between the two. It really does boggle my mind that no one likes it. The only thing I can think, is Google didn&#x27;t find a way to appeal to peoples&#x27; egos enough, since that&#x27;s what social media seems to be about for most people.

As much as I hate the Facebook hegemony; I can only say &quot;Good Riddance&quot;. Me and my circle of friends tried it out on release and to this day it still a UX nightmare in how it presents&#x2F;displays posts.<p>It&#x27;s a classic case of google dipping their toes in a service and if they don&#x27;t reach critical mass in 3 months just ignore it until it becomes a liability and shut it down quietly. I would love to hear if they ever pushed updates for it or just had some intern maintaining the code up until now.

I knew G+ was dead when hardcore porn was spammed to software groups and there was just no care factor.<p>Google can filter this perfectly on image searches, but not on their social networks?<p>It&#x27;s a shame, I really liked the concept of circles. Where am I going to get my Buzz now?

To me, the worst part about Google+ has been the fact that Google services started forcing you to use it. Like I&#x27;d click on some sort of account settings tab on YouTube, and suddenly I&#x27;d be redirected to a different website and my first reaction is always &quot;what the hell is this crap?&quot; Worse yet, there was always an irritatingly huge delay between changes I made to my Google+ &quot;shadow profile&quot; and my profile on YouTube.<p>Hopefully this will put an end to that nonsense?

I&#x27;ve been a long-time critic of G+.<p>But it&#x27;s because I&#x27;ve also been a long-time user of the service, signing on in July of 2011, and continuing to use it, often through gritted teeth, and desperately hoping something better would come along, and yet ... nothing really has, at least not that I&#x27;ve been aware.<p>There&#x27;s a long litany of mistakes and errors (and many successes) in the service, and I might eventually sit down and write my own post mortem of what I thought went right and wrong -- I&#x27;ve written a few, most of which still stand, though the cooption of media, social and otherwise, for propaganda and disinformation purposes could be expanded on.<p>There are several groups formed to look at exodus options, presuming people want to go to any one platform (something I&#x27;d actually somewhat discourage). It may be that the age of centralised social networks is over, though self-hosting and federation also have considerable challenges. Or, maybe, we go back to other models. Hacker News is an exemplar I&#x27;ve referenced more than a few times. It&#x27;s not a personal network the way G+, FB, Twitter, or a personal blog are, but it has a (usually) high level of discussion of an interesting array of topics. Thanks in large part to active moderation and flying slightly under the radar.<p>If you&#x27;re on G+ and want to discuss next steps, stop by Google+ Mass Migration:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;communities&#x2F;112164273001338979772&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;communities&#x2F;112164273001338979772&#x2F;</a>

I’m already starting to sunset my google usage.

Not that this will (or should) surprise anyone at all, but I noticed (perhaps more so than normal) that many of the top headlines about this more than subtly imply that the shutdown was a result of the potential data exposure, rather than the lack of popularity.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;search?q=google%2B&amp;hl=en-US&amp;gl=US&amp;ceid=US%3Aen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;search?q=google%2B&amp;hl=en-US&amp;gl=US&amp;ce...</a>

I consider myself lucky to know enough to avoid putting personal information with Google and its properties. But Google is the main platform for many people for many things of a personal nature, and they also end up giving it a lot of information through Android. So any breach has a huge damage surface.<p>Google+, with all its missteps, was one of those products that even a company with Google&#x27;s money, resources and people (like Luke Wroblewski) that couldn&#x27;t get better at all. I liked the concept of &quot;circles&quot; as opposed to the concept of &quot;lists&quot; on Facebook that most people don&#x27;t know about or use. The only mistake that Google+ did was not copying Facebook on its features. That increased the barriers to adoption and made the product almost worthless. Even something as useful as creating an event was buried in a classic G+ interface, and in the new interface it&#x27;s buried under profile. Treating vanity URLs as very scarce commodities and letting people live with long unspeakable links, not implementing a groups like functionality well (called &quot;Communities&quot;), and many other things could&#x27;ve been handled if they just copied what Facebook did and took the good lessons from those.<p>It&#x27;s sad that Google+ would be gone soon, though it could&#x27;ve been a viable competitor for Facebook as far as centralized, ad supported platforms are concerned. But it&#x27;s good that an abandoned product gets a quicker death, and that&#x27;s exactly what Google+ was — an abandoned zombie product trying to figure out whether it was alive or dead.<p>I&#x27;d take this as one less commercial social network to worry about, and await the adoption of a decentralized social network.

&gt; Instead of seeing all requested permissions in a single screen, apps will have to show you each requested permission, one at a time, within its own dialog box....you will be able to choose to share one but not the other.<p>I really felt the need for Android like permission model for my Google account, where you can reject a permission request and still use the app.<p>Much appreciated change, that allows more refined control over account privacy.

I didn&#x27;t use the social aspect much, but the ability to +1 a URL was awesome. With the browser plugin installed, I could immediately tell what kind of traction a site was getting and, in the case of technical information, if the contents were considered valid and useful by a large number of developers. They silently killed this feature about a year ago, and it showed [1] in the reviews for the Chrome plugin. I went a little crazy when the feature went away because I didn&#x27;t realize how much I had relied on it. Not having it has made the web less useful for me.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;google-%201-button&#x2F;jgoepmocgafhnchmokaimcmlojpnlkhp?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;google-%201-button...</a>

The only surprise is that it takes them such long time to shut it down. It is clearly failed project; it is an internet ghost town; very very few care about it. It almost felt like the only reason it last to date is to protect some high profile executives&#x27; self-esteem, while being the living relics of Google&#x27;s strategic mistake tapping into the social land.

I want to applaud Google&#x27;s general philosophy of &quot;try stuff, shut it down if it doesn&#x27;t work&quot; but I do wonder if this isn&#x27;t bad for the brand. They&#x27;ve been pretty &quot;ruthless&quot; when it comes to shutting down things that some people still use (or at least that&#x27;s the image).<p>I think in the back of their minds, possibly subconsciously, people like me probably make decisions against other technology they provide even if it is in a completely different category and pretty much never going to shut down.<p>For example, I&#x27;m not sure I haven&#x27;t decided against their cloud services because my subconscious remembered the reader being shut down and thought &quot;they better not shut down some part of the infrastructure I rely on&quot;.

I liked Google+, but this is one of the reasons why I stopped using it. I think it was around the time they cancelled Google Reader. By randomly cancelling products that are still used by lots of people, they&#x27;re dooming other products before they even launched.

I see a lot of rationalization here about why Google+ didn&#x27;t take off, related to feature set, Facebook, etc.<p>Let me throw wood on fire ... the reason Google+ is a failure has nothing to do with any of its features:<p>1. they killed Google Reader for it, which was more successful than Google+ ever hoped to be, forever tarnishing Google&#x27;s reputation<p>2. they had the Real Name Policy ... by the time they reversed and apologized for it, the damage was already done<p>3. they shoved Google+ down on everybody&#x27;s throats, like YouTube users, exposing their real identities in the process<p>There are no other reasons that matter. Google+ could have been at least at Twitter&#x27;s scale. Twitter still understands their audience, but Google never did.

If only Google had integrated Wave into YouTube, they would have ruled the world.<p>In YT they already had a massive user-based; (for a time, not sure if it&#x27;s still true) the second most searched search engine in the world.<p>In Wave they had threaded conversations. That is a communications UX that was closer (than Slack et al) to natural &#x2F; traditional human conversations.<p>Toss in some of the better G+ features (e.g., Circles) and they likely could have been a contender. The problem (I suspect) was they saw FB as &quot;competition&quot; instead of stepping over and beyond FB, as FB had done to MySpace and Friendster.<p>Further proof that Google isn&#x27;t a product company, but an algorithm company (per Thiel, trying to hide from regulators)?

I don&#x27;t know that I am going to trust google&#x27;s consumer product offerings anymore. Inbox became central to my life, now this. I am now going to operate under the presupposition that a google product is not a reliable product.

&#x27;We believe it occurred after launch as a result of the API’s interaction with a subsequent Google+ code change.&#x27;<p>It is very hard to believe that they can&#x27;t track when exactly the bug was introduced. All code changes are tracked in the source control.

I posted this on the other discussion related to this, but would love to get feedback here.<p>----------------- I can understand this position, but I&#x27;d be curious what your thoughts are on how to best (I realize there is no perfect) keep your data private from snooping employees, hackers, or law enforcement.<p>I&#x27;ve thought about this over and over, and it&#x27;s hard to come to a solid conclusion about keeping personal data safe (in this context I mean emails and files you may store in the cloud, not browsing history, social media posts, etc.). There are so many options with downfalls for each, and I&#x27;m not a security expert. So every time I get excited about trying a new service geared towards privacy, or setting up my own instances, inevitably somebody points out the terrible pitfall in it and I get discouraged.<p>1. Don&#x27;t use the internet or internet services, period. &lt;- Not tenable for most of us.<p>2. Use services who market themselves as geared towards privacy. &lt;- Can&#x27;t actually trust those services, even with E2E encryption because they could be running different code from what you think they&#x27;re running.<p>3. Use regular cloud options, but stack stuff on top - VeraCrypt volumes or Cryptomator with Google drive, GPG for email, etc. &lt;- Really difficult to setup and have a nice reliable way of accessing data on mobile&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;etc. No security audits on a lot of the open source software.<p>4. Host your own services - i.e. a Nextcloud 14 instance on EC2 with an S3 backend, then use client-side E2E &lt;- Difficult to make sure you set the service up in a safe way, and not even a fraction of as much resources in auditing code as, say, a giant corporation.<p>5. Spread what you do out over multiple services - FastMail for email, DropBox for cloud storage, Standard Notes for notes, etc. &lt;- A real pain.<p>I know there will never be a consensus on this, but I&#x27;d love to hear what your thoughts are on the best way to keep my personal files and notes personal to me. Let&#x27;s assume I&#x27;m not a target of any spy agencies or whatnot, but I want to make it very, very difficult for anyone to read my person notes and files but me.

So, does it mean they will bring &quot;+&quot; back to search to make it usable again?

Makes you wonder - if not the first comer advantage would have google made a name for itself? Every product google puts out is an arguable failure and their search engine and email client aren&#x27;t particularily amazing either - just they were there first.<p>Maybe they should start getting back to the roots - try to secure that first comer advantage by launching experimental products. Oh wait google glass, inbox...<p>For a company that is praised for biggest software talent they sure fail to deliver anything of value to the medium time and time again.

IMHO Google+ failed for one reason. At least it&#x27;s the reason it failed for me. There was no way to post something on someone else&#x27;s feed. When I used Facebook, this may have been the #1 thing that I used it for (and events).<p>If I saw something I thought a friend would enjoy or made me think of them, I&#x27;d post it on their wall. This is drastically different than sending a message or e-mailing in that my friend&#x27;s friends will also see it.<p>In Google+ (at least when I tried it), there was no way to perform this action. So I never used it again.

The timing is too amazing. I can&#x27;t help but wonder if my experience somehow contributed to management&#x27;s decision: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@david.liedle&#x2F;is-machine-learning-at-google-falling-apart-googles-system-doesn-t-believe-i-m-a-person-88c92159c979" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@david.liedle&#x2F;is-machine-learning-at-goog...</a>

I&#x27;m surprised that google keeps blogger.com for this long. it doesn&#x27;t appear to be a commercial success and its features fall behind newer platforms like medium.

Why can&#x27;t they just let the software run on a spare set of servers with minimal maintenance for those who still want to use it <i>or</i> publish it as open source?

Serious question: you build your own social network based on what people really want it too work like, and won’t track them or allow advertising, instead you invite just a handful of “promoters” every year to show same ad to everyone (to pay your bills) and build in tools that will accept facebook export format - how do you crank-start such network to beat an obvious chicken-and-egg problem?

My family is using Google+ to coordinate and share internal news (because do you really want to friend your parents on Facebook?).<p>Given that they are going to close this down for us as consumers, what is our best alternative? I would rather not have to have the headache of running and maintaining software myself, but what options do you recommend?<p>Or do we just have to bite the bullet and set up the Shaftoe e-mail list?

Google+ was not at all a bad product. It had some functionality that other networks didn&#x27;t have at the time. I used to browse through Google+ because of Linus Torvalds and the Linux community. I think that if Google had decoupled it from the Google platform and developed G+ as an independent entity within the umbrella, things would have been different.

I wonder what this will affect SEO practices. I remember one of the things google had made as a small factor for search, it&#x27;s the integration of Google Plus in your website. Like using the plus button.<p>Like what happens if I remove all google plus code related from my sites right now? My guess it&#x27;s that in the short term will have some kind of negative impact, but I don&#x27;t know.

&gt; consumer Google+<p>What is our relationship to Google? Are we really consumers of Google? Content creators? Ad targetees? Impressionees? Folks? Lemmings?

I survived the 4 years they blasted Google+ signups at me without signing up once with my account. Luckily that dissipated after a while and things got less annoying every time I signed in. I imagine most people clicked &quot;I agree&quot; and created their public page. But it was really awful for the rest of us that didn&#x27;t want that.

Some high profile users like Linus were active on G+. I can&#x27;t imagine those people using FB so what&#x27;s the alternative?

Let me guess - everyone&#x27;s old posts will disappear?<p>I can imagine Google doing it that way. &quot;The majority never used our platform, so we&#x27;ll abuse the few that did (and really liked it) by only giving them X amount of time to notice and save their data.&quot;<p>If Google+ becomes archived my jaw will hit the floor - and I&#x27;ll be very appreciative.

No other platform had as much clickspam &#x2F; clickfraud stuff as G+. Every time I looked at my feed there were 10+ pictures of fake hot girl videos that clicked off to random sites. That G+ itself was such a player in click fraud, I&#x27;m surprised there wasn&#x27;t more hay made about this before.

Another one bites the dust... I can easily imagine that in 100 years Alphabet would have been rebranded as Google, and only one single service will be generating ~100% of revenues.<p>There will also be a software graveyard with the 1,000+ dead projects that google launched and then shut down years later.

Perhaps one of the reasons that it was difficult to engage with Google+ is because of this outcome: that Google&#x2F;tech corporations are known to kill products that are not completely successful, even if there are engaged users who will be affected by this shutdown.

oh no. My family have used G+ to share stuff. I don&#x27;t want to have my mother-in-law on facebook, what else can we use? I really like the idea of circles, some stuff I would share only with my close family, other stuff would be shared with wider family and friends, etc.

Several of the communities I belong to are moving to MeWe as a replacement. Several of us had never heard of it before, but the privacy controls and business model surprised the hell out of me. I&#x27;m impressed so far.

This does make me sad as I am one of the few that still uses G+ fairly regularly. There are still a lot of quality feeds and I&#x27;ve enjoyed seeing that content without all the crap Facebook wraps its content in.

&gt; Users can grant access to their Profile data, and the public Profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API.<p>Interesting, wasn&#x27;t this basically the same problem that Facebook had with Cambridge Analytica?

Phew, hopefully all the developers working on Google+ enjoy their new project working on a currently unnamed chat program. We haven&#x27;t had a new one of those in <i>checks calendar</i> 172 days.

&quot;90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.&quot;<p>Oof. Good on them for finally admitting it, but who knew the data would be even harsher than G+&#x27;s most vocal critics.

They killed it when they decided it would be a good idea to inflate user numbers with YouTube and Gmail users. It&#x27;s better to have less but active users than a ghost town.

So glad my Google+ was deleted long ago and subsequently deleted all my Google products. Not sure why people give these crappy ad companies (Google, FB, etc) all their data.

Is there any way for EU citizens to hammer Google with GDPR over this?<p>Isn&#x27;t one of the stipulations of GDPR that a company must disclose privacy violations of this nature?

How (if at all) does this impact &quot;Login with your Gmail&quot; and those APIs? They started off separate but were subsequently combined into one common package.

&quot;90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds&quot;.<p>I&#x27;d say let&#x27;s have a moment of silence for Google+, but that is clearly too generous

I kind of think they wanted to shut Google+ down anyways and the data breach just gives them a convenient excuse. I doubt Google+ was growing at all.

This is the big surprise to me:<p>&gt; Finding 2: People want fine-grained controls over the data they share with apps.<p>While I personally 100% agree, I would have guessed that the vast majority of Google users (i.e., non-HN crowd) wouldn&#x27;t care about fine-grained controls. I wonder if they found that some people passionately care and most didn&#x27;t care one way or another. In other words, perhaps the people that click&#x2F;tap through permissions prompts are going to continue clicking through, but the change could win back some privacy conscious consumers.

The main thing I want to see come out of this is the reinstatement of + as the inclusive operator in a Google search.

...but but without Google+, how are Google employees going to publicly announce their intentions to leave Google?!?!?

To me, it seems that they just found a good reason to kill a product born to fail without losing their face.

What happens to the old content?<p>(Also, small thin sans-serif grey body font means you hate your readers&#x27; eyes.)

So my joke about &quot;I put it on Google+ so it&#x27;s basically a secret&quot; is coming true.

No wonder! Google with their notorious interviews false to test one fundamental software engineer trait - common sense! Most of their products are short-sighted and much neglected. I won&#x27;t ever invest a second looking into another Google offering! Keep off! They have zero respect for your time invested in their toy products!

&quot;...the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API&quot;<p>&quot;This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender and age.&quot;<p>It is also including a lot more than what they said above:<p>The json per profile is as follows:<p>{ &quot;kind&quot;: &quot;plus#person&quot;, &quot;etag&quot;: etag, &quot;nickname&quot;: string, &quot;occupation&quot;: string, &quot;skills&quot;: string, &quot;birthday&quot;: string, &quot;gender&quot;: string, &quot;emails&quot;: [ { &quot;value&quot;: string, &quot;type&quot;: string } ], &quot;urls&quot;: [ { &quot;value&quot;: string, &quot;type&quot;: string, &quot;label&quot;: string } ], &quot;objectType&quot;: string, &quot;id&quot;: string, &quot;displayName&quot;: string, &quot;name&quot;: { &quot;formatted&quot;: string, &quot;familyName&quot;: string, &quot;givenName&quot;: string, &quot;middleName&quot;: string, &quot;honorificPrefix&quot;: string, &quot;honorificSuffix&quot;: string }, &quot;tagline&quot;: string, &quot;braggingRights&quot;: string, &quot;aboutMe&quot;: string, &quot;relationshipStatus&quot;: string, &quot;url&quot;: string, &quot;image&quot;: { &quot;url&quot;: string,<p><pre><code> }, &quot;organizations&quot;: [ { &quot;name&quot;: string, &quot;department&quot;: string, &quot;title&quot;: string, &quot;type&quot;: string, &quot;startDate&quot;: string, &quot;endDate&quot;: string, &quot;location&quot;: string, &quot;description&quot;: string, &quot;primary&quot;: boolean } ], &quot;placesLived&quot;: [ { &quot;value&quot;: string, &quot;primary&quot;: boolean } ], &quot;isPlusUser&quot;: boolean, &quot;language&quot;: string, &quot;ageRange&quot;: { &quot;min&quot;: integer, &quot;max&quot;: integer }, &quot;plusOneCount&quot;: integer, &quot;circledByCount&quot;: integer, &quot;verified&quot;: boolean, &quot;cover&quot;: { &quot;layout&quot;: string, &quot;coverPhoto&quot;: { &quot;url&quot;: string, &quot;height&quot;: integer, &quot;width&quot;: integer }, &quot;coverInfo&quot;: { &quot;topImageOffset&quot;: integer, &quot;leftImageOffset&quot;: integer } }, &quot;domain&quot;: string</code></pre> }<p>(from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;+&#x2F;web&#x2F;api&#x2F;rest&#x2F;latest&#x2F;people" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;+&#x2F;web&#x2F;api&#x2F;rest&#x2F;latest&#x2F;people</a>)

People are burying the lede. They massively covered up a data breach. The same company that forces other companies to release info about their breaches or else releases the vulnerabilities themselves. Google deserves the same backlash as fb but maybe too many google employees here?

I wonder if we get to use the + modifier in Google Search again.

I hear up to a dozen people may have been affected by this.

Any indication if they&#x27;d be willing to open source it?

does anyone have a clue how much money they spent building g+ and how many developers have to find new jobs (presumably within google) because of this?

Dear god google is going to make me accept each permission individually? That sounds awful as a user. I think it&#x27;s a dark UX pattern to get developers to ask for less shit.

Any indication if they&#x27;ll open source it?

as a Facebook addict who used it for 10 years straight im surprised i don&#x27;t miss it at all, going 10 months strong.

Can I search for +hotdogs again now?

Thank god. I remember when google+ first came out, in what being shove down our throats at every google service.

Yippie!

Bring back Orkut!

Good riddance

F

Personally, I think the headline &quot;Google hid major Google+ security flaw that exposed users’ personal information&quot; is probably the better one.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;8&#x2F;17951914&#x2F;google-plus-data-breach-exposed-user-profile-information-privacy-not-disclosed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;8&#x2F;17951914&#x2F;google-plus-data...</a>

I am so done with Facebook, Instagram, and Google.<p>I deleted my Facebook and Instagram three weeks ago and haven&#x27;t looked back. I removed Chrome and Chromium from all my computers. No, I don&#x27;t want to sync using your servers. If you let me host the sync servers myself like Mozilla does I&#x27;d consider it.<p>If my friends want to talk to me they can make an account on my privately hosted Matrix.org chat server and use the open-source Riot.im client.<p>It works flawlessly and I don&#x27;t have to worry about being spied on.<p>Next is Gmail. I find the new UI atrocious. I&#x27;m keeping my eye on Maps alternatives as well.<p>The faster I can get rid of all this crap the better off I will be.

I&#x27;m going to get downvoted for this, but you don&#x27;t have to state &quot;IMHO&quot; or any variation of that in your posts. You are the one posting it; we know it&#x27;s your opinion. It just adds grammatical clutter and noise to an otherwise well thought-out post.<p>IMHO

What a poorly managed company.

why don&#x27;t they say it as it is, it failed miserably... instead of using security as an excuse to shutdown the service ?

The damage control we&#x27;re seeing is almost as blatantly immoral as a quasi-government monopoly appointing itself as the internet police and then neglecting to disclose its own breeches to the public.<p>Google is evil.