Today marks the end of the road for Google’s failed social media experiment, Google+.
Google confirmed that fact to The Verge in an email sent by a company spokesperson.
The company will begin clearing out user profiles, deleting all of the information uploaded over the course of the service’s life.
While the service failed to compete with rivals Facebook and Twitter, Google+ nonetheless found a pretty healthy following among Gmail users.
It just never quite caught on and started to become a running joke on the Internet because of how desolate it was.
Initially, Google planned on shuttering their social media service in August of this year but a security hole in Google+ that exposed user information, among other things, led to an accelerated timeline for wrapping it up.
Even though this bug existed, Google says there isn’t any evidence that malicious activity occurred and developer APIs were cut off back when the plans to close it down were initially announced.
Google’s Ben Smith said of the failure of the social media venture that, “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, and has seen limited user interaction with apps.”
As The Verge points out, the average user session for 90% of Google+ members was just five seconds long. Cue tumbleweeds and a whistling breeze.
The service wasn’t without its fans, however.
Chris Welch of The Verge explains that a lot of the Google+ users used it because, “people took to it for its topic-focused discussions, which helped conversations feel more substantial and constructive than the squabbling that is so often found on the public square that is Facebook or even Reddit. Google+ let you organize people into circles, which the company hoped would feel more true to the way we share things in day-to-day life.”
