Google+ Is Poised To Shut Down. Is this an opportunity for Steemit?
Hey Steemians
The year 2018 may be remembered for plenty of reasons and one of them has to be it that it was the year we saw faltering social media sites call it quits with Klout and StumbleUpon being the first high profile casualties of the year. Now we've just heard Google+ will be joining the pile of failed projects with Google announcing its official demise.
WHY CALL IT QUITS NOW?
Google+ was Google's ill-fated attempt at creating its own social media platform to take on Facebook and Twitter. It all started back in 2010 with Google Buzz and then a year later, it launched Google+ with the aim of taking on the big boys.
As Facebook began to dominate the social media space Google decided to focus less and less on winning social market and doubled down on search and G+ was basically living on borrowed time. While they could have gone out with a whimper and kept it off the radar, they decided to go out in a blaze of glory.
Clearly keen to prove that Facebook isn’t the only company that can get itself into trouble over privacy and data, Google has today joined the club by confirming that a Google+ security bug allowed third-party developers to access user data unimpeded, with the issue dating all the way back to 2015.
To make matters worse, Google decided not to share knowledge of the data breach when it was discovered in March and reported on by the Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal broke the news of the software bug, reporting that Google chose to not disclose the problem “because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage.”
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
The issue apparently came about when a user granted permission to an app, allowing it to access their public data similar to the exploit Facebook recently faced with its shared login data breach.
The problem was that this also gave those same developers access to the user’s friends’ non-public profiles.
In turn, this meant that almost 500,000 users’ names, email addresses, dates of birth, gender, location, occupation, and relationship status were made available to developers, all without their knowledge.
Google says that there was no evidence that the information was misused, but that a total of 438 apps had access. That's a lot of user data to expose to 438 different companies who could have used that information for monetary gain.
WHAT DOES GOOGLE HAVE TO SAY FOR ITSELF?
Google said it’s pulling the plug on its unpopular Google+ social network after admitting to a software bug that exposed the personal information of as many as 500,000 users.
The tech giant announced the news on the company blog, disclosing the compromised user-privacy issue for the first time, despite knowing about it for seven months.
“We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018,” Ben Smith, the company’s vice president of engineering, wrote. The software flaw affected how the social network, created to rival Facebook but never seriously challenging it, interacting with third-party applications.
“We are shutting down Google+ for consumers,” Smith added, admitting that the product was, at best, underwhelming. “While our engineering teams have put a lot of effort and dedication into building Google+ over the years, it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption. … The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”
The company will wind down Google+ over 10 months, targeting an August 2019 shutdown.
GOOGLE TRYING TO TURN A NEGATIVE INTO A +
Google+ simply lacked the foresight that Facebook had and did not innovate quickly enough to keep up, it was a rather arrogant play to think that they could simply leverage their other assets to build a social media empire.
Instead of having its own unique recruitment drive and benefits, Google pushed its social platform very hard by trying to integrate its comments with YouTube and make web logins part of G+ which users simply rejected as intrusive and wasn't seen as a natural adoption.
It then saw the writing on the wall and slowly started to remove G+ connections with other assets and even went as far as to remove their share counter API.
It really was only a matter of time and this data breach was a rather large final nail in the coffin.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO G+ COMMUNITIES?
While G+ may be seen as a failure to most, there were still a large number of people using the site on a daily basis with monthly visits in the sitting at around 300 million and while compared to Facebook and Twitter that many a drop in the ocean, its a sizeable amount of users now looking for a new place to call home.
The main pull for many using G+ was the ease of sharing and engaging with content in an organic and ad-free environment. Most notably, Google+ fans say the ability to write long posts, and a focus on topics that connect people — instead of existing friendships or celebrities — created a platform that encouraged real, sustained dialogue with strangers.
I think that the traits G+ users value most are some things Steemit could offer them and if we could even attract 10% of active G+ users it would be a great leap forward in driving mass adoption of the platform.
The fact that there were still millions of people around the world still using Google+ even when it was being ripped to shred with little or no support with improvements to me shows the need for a long-form content, community-based ad-free social network. It's really is a great opportunity for Steemit to pick up the users now left stranded by Klout, StumbleUpon and G+ and create an anchor user base that can drive the economy, add new interest segments and drive the use case forward.
Have your say
Did you ever use G+? Will G+ users eventually find a home in Steemit? How do we welcome them into our platform? Let me know in the comments!
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I certainly think we will see some users migrate here from Google Plus. But the main problem with Google Plus was that no one really used it, so most of the existing users simply won't use a new social media platform. The ones that did may not come here since they obviously didn't care much about privacy violations, so aren't going to be focused on an anonymous or decentralized platform specifically.
But who knows? Maybe Google Plus shutting down and giving more attention to their malfeasance will help wake some more people up.
I agree some may find that they just don't need to use a site anymore and some may look for solice elsewhere. I just think that even if a small % of those millions of G+ users find their way to steemit it could really give the site a bump up in activity and maybe even retention.
And the fact that facebook is facing the same issue will perhaps push people who were on the fense that still used social media to drop it and look for alternatives. Unfortunately steemit is not well the most marketed site ever, you kinda find it by word of mouth from what i've experienced and heard about from others
Indeed, I heard about Steemit from another user on Minds. Cross promotion on these alternative social media sites is a key to the success of all of them, in my opinion. Of course, Steemit needs to deliver a good user experience for people who do show up, and that has been a bit rough from what I have heard lately. I might more avidly advertise for this site once they fix more of the known issues and create better onboarding procedures.
Oh wow, never heard of minds, is it simliar to steemit? Hows things working out for you on that site? Is it also about earning crypto for conent? or more just a decentralise platform for uncensored views?
I agree onboarding is rough and the learning curve is terrible, ive gone through it myself and have had 4 people ive tried to help get into it and its hard to keep them motivated and see the light. Often times i question how I even got this far because I had no help lol my first 50 posts i got zero payouts i didnt know wtf i was doing
Minds is quite a bit different from Steemit. It's possible to earn Minds Tokens, their version of Steem, but the actual monetization of that is a bit murkier. I think you can indeed exchange them for money, but the exchange rate isn't great and it's not really the typical use for a token. The main thing people use tokens for is boosting, where your post gets a guaranteed number of views on what is called the boostfeed, a feed of non-subscribed content on everyone's feeds. You can disable this on your own feed just like you can disable ads on other platforms, by signing up for Minds plus. It's worth noting you can also pay for Minds plus with tokens.
So, you basically get the option to advertise on their platform by earning and spending tokens, 1000 views for each. It's really great because it helps break out of the normal bubble one can sometimes find themselves in online, both in getting your content noticed and finding other people with interesting content.
I personally enjoy the site quite a bit, though I haven't made as much cryptocurrency there. You could always check it out, maybe read the faq for more information.
https://www.minds.com/faq
Interesting news @chekohler
I didn't know that Google+ is shuting down.
I think that in current times running social media business is not very profitable and very risky. I bet it's a right decision that google did.
Yours
Piotr
Lol most people didn't even know it was stil running, it become a forgotten google product and those who still used it made it there own. I still used it because you could keep in touch with SEO's and other Google communities like paid search marketers or display marketers. So it was more in a proffesional sense, will probably migrate those relationships to Linkedin
I suppose so, it was kind of a waste of resources and something Google clearly wants to move on from as it foucses on dominating search its also begun to add social elements into it like Google Posts and Google Cameos
indeed you're right :) "Lol most people didn't even know it was stil running"
nailed it! :)
Lol!! Definitely a recruiting op!! Besides the better user interface its pretty much the same community driven concept except you get paid for it!!
Lets setup that GA and SEO discord channels!!
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Lol speaking of the interfact I was on the site recently and I was thinking about how well designed it is, pretty clean, simple intuitve, a lot of thought went into it and the G+ search is still one of the best around. If only they could have open sourced that code and help make steemit or busy.org better.
I used google + for about 30 seconds in the first year or two it came out I think. I remember it looked ridiculous and had no interest in pursuing it any further but I knew it still persisted. I use gmail on my laptop and can see the little pop up on the side saying connect to it and friends all the time it annoys me.
It just goes to show that when companies get lazy, don’t innovate and try to be original the consumers certainly let them know by just not using it. Companies need to find their niche and stick to it, this was an example of what is clearly not a niche for google.
It would be great for us all here at Steemit if even 1% of those users decided to come over but we also need to make improvements to this platform. There is a sore lack of a welcome page with ideas and groups to get started with to guide you along this fun but confusing journey.
LOL i love how you say for 30 seconds. I had the opposite experience, we started using it work to market our products and because it had influence on search rankings at the tiem and Google also indexed G+ posts pretty quickly we saw a bump in traffic which is how I got hooked on the platform. Then i found communities for memes, anime, comic books, cars and digital marketing and I followed them and I really got some cool content out of it.
But you are right it was a lazy attempt and I know they tried to get the peeps frmo 4chan to come help out and make it better but yeah they didn't understand social and just tried to copy facebook from a safe distance
I do agree it would do well having new people with new ideas and hopefully counter arguments, there is a bit too much acceptanc of things and yeah if we have more people making noise a few things I dont agree with wouldnt be flying under the radar so much. Lol that welcome page I dont think ive used it in months and the UI is painful i prefer using busy.org or eSteem. I did try out SteemPlus also it really kicks up your steemit experience but it does make page loads a bit slower
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The G+ collections are perhaps the best invention in G+. Gave me 20k+ followers. And I'm going to lose them all now... would love if it was possible to follow a set of "username+tag"'s instead of entire users. I don't care for 90% of what people post.
Reposts/resteems should always be placed in collections so that readers can filter them in or out depending on topic. G+ was great at this.
And communities... Love them.
Totally man, G+ had a lot of considerate UX features that really added to the experience and made it easier to curate and explore content. I do think Steemit has a huge UX problem and would to well to take a few pages out of G='s bok on how to structure a content based ad free platform