Google Plus seems to be shut down definitely!
As it seems, the social media platform didn’t
succeed against Facebook as intended. In 2011
Google Plus was announced as an alternative.

However Facebook had already a 700 million users. Hard competition if you will and Google had the opinion that a lightweight social media hub could drag users away from Facebook. In 2012 Google also tied down Google Mail and other services to the simultaneous creation of a Google+ account. However this was soon lifted again as users didn’t want to create a social media platform account just to use business services such as Google Mail or Google Documents.

Google announced yesterday that the service will be shutdown for public use by the end of August 2019, which is also the deadline for users to backup all their data stored on Google Plus.

The product itself, however is said to be further developed as a business service for companies to have a communication platform for the Intranet. But I guess even there it might be difficult to cope with, say Sharepoint or Confluence which also offer social media services if configured.

The reasons for the shutdown were that 90% of all logins didn’t stay for longer than few seconds (maybe short check if there are new messages etc.) and also complications with the Google API. Later there were also leaks reported that could reveal sensitive information about the Google Plus account that were supposed to remain secret.

I also used Google Plus but have now stopped the usage of this as the future is unknown.