Google is finally doing away with Google Plus. In case you did not know, Google Plus is the company’s failed social network which once aimed to compete with the likes of Facebook. Google has already shut the end-user version of Google Plus and now it is pulling the plug on the enterprise version as well.
Google is replacing Google Plus with Google Currents. The iOS and Android apps of the social networking platform have already been rebranded. Currents is available for everyone starting today.
Aimed at enterprise users, Google Currents aims to help “people to have meaningful discussions and interactions across your organization, helping keep everyone in the know and giving leaders the opportunity to connect with their employees,” the company said in a blog post last year.
Google Currents comes with a new interface and a bunch of new features. The home screen can be customised and lets you focus on the important posts. Users also have the flexibility to sort the home stream on the basis on relevancy.
Just like Google+, Google Currents also allows users to post comments, ask questions through posts, and share feedback. It comes with built-in analytics to gauge the reach of each posts. Users can also follow tags and other topic-based streams to discover more content based on their preference.
A brief history of Google+
That said, Google Plus is one of the biggest failures for Google. Launched in June 2011, Google+ saw an instant mass uptake from users. Within two weeks of its launch, Google+ had garnered 10 million users. By 2013, the platform had about 540 million monthly active users.
The numbers, however, don’t reveal that people signed up on Google Plus because of Google’s ecosystem products such as Gmail and YouTube. A 2014 report in The New York Times described the social network as a “ghost town” as many users of Google Plus never visited the platform at all.
Despite redesign and improvements over the years, Google+ failed to take off. Rivals Facebook and Twitter continued to increase their user base in the meanwhile.
In October 2018, Google formally announced they were shutting down the platform for users. The final nail to the coffin for Google Plus came in December 2018 when it suffered a major security breach that affected as many as 52.5 million users. Google Plus for end-users was finally shut down in April last year.
So long, Google Plus. You will not be missed.