Google Plus Going Away on April 2

Google Plus is a social network site launched by Google on June 28, 2011, to challenge Facebook, one of the widely used Social network site. In Oct 2018 Google announced to shut down Google plus for general users. On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and Google will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts.

Why is Google Plus Shutting Down

At the beginning of 2018, Google started a project to review third-party data access to Google account. This project finds the challenges in creating and maintaining successful products. As per Google

The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.

Also, Google found a bug in the Google plus API, which allows developers to access the profile fields that are not to the public. According to Google "This data is limited to static, optional Google+ Profile fields including name, email address, occupation, gender, and age. and It does not include any other data"
Once the bug was discovered this bug was patched. 438 applications were using that API and this bug impacted approximately 52.5 million users. According to Google

We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.

Google shut down the consumer version of Google+ because resources needed to keep Google+ and its associated APIs safe were no longer a wise investment. Google decided to keep the enterprise edition running because it still serves a critical collaboration feature within G Suite.

Before Google Plus Shutdown

As early as February 4th, you will no longer be able to create new Google+ profiles, pages, communities or events.
For Google+ community owner you can download data from the community and start from March 2019, additional data will be available.
If you were using Google plus to sign in to another site these buttons will stop working and may be replaced with Google sing in.
If you are using Google+ for comments on your site it will stop working by March 7. And blogger will remove this feature by 4th Feb.
If you have an account or Google Plus page with Google plus you will get an email informing about all this information.

Download your Data

You can download your data from Google plus using Google Takeout. Follow this link Takeout Google Plus

Download Google Plus data

Then click Next. Now you can customize the download type. You can select the archive format. The maximum size of the file, it will be split to multiple files if it exceeds it. and finally, Delivery method, how you would like to get the downloaded data. You can save it to your online storage or download it. If you choose to download it will be available for one week to download

Conclusion

Google plus is going away. On April 2nd, Google will begin deleting content from consumer Google+. You can download your data from Google Takeout enterprise edition will still be up and running.

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