Google plus an international web based social media application. This was developed and operated by Google, introduced in June 2011 with the core motive to compete and challenge other social media platforms in existence such as Facebook, twitter , Instagram and the likes .
Everyone with a google account automatically has this account, as at April 2018 google account users where about 1.2 billion, as stated by encyclopedia making it one of the most widely used systems, in turn there exist 1.2 billion google plus accounts
why is google closing down google plus ?
Report from engadget states that Following the massive data exposure first reported on by The Wall Street Journal. Google announced shutting down its social network Google+ for consumers. While data was exposed, there is no evidence that it was improperly accessed.
The company finally admitted that Google+ never received the broad adoption or engagement with users that it had hoped for. According to a blog post, 90 percent of Google+ user sessions last for less than five seconds. In light of these newly revealed security concerns with Google+’s API. The company has opted to put it out of its misery rather than try and make the social network more secure.
The company discovered a bug in one of Google+’s People APIs that allowed apps access to data from Google+ profiles that weren’t marked as public. It included static data fields such as name, email, occupation, gender and age. It did not include information from Google+ posts.
The bug was patched in March 2018. But Google didn’t inform users at that point. “We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks,” the company said in a blog post. “That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug.”
Google articles
upon this google posted an article on January 30th , 2019 which states :
In December 2018, we announced our decision to shut down Google+ for consumers in April 2019 due to low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations. We want to thank you for being part of Google+ and provide next steps, including how to download your photos and other content.
On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted. You can download and save your content, just make sure to do so before April. Note that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.
from google support
In a nutshell your Google+ account is going away on April 2, 2019, so quickly make download and save all your contents.
