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Google+ died 5 years ago, and I still miss these 5 features today
G+ was the greatest social network not used by enough people
Google kills a lot of products, but Google+ deserved to live, and five years after the announcement of its demise, that fact has become more apparent than ever to me. Social media has changed a lot since 2019, and not for the better. Google+ had features the remaining networks are still trying to catch up with, and some still show no sign of appearing elsewhere. So, as we look back at this fallen hero, these are the Google+ features I still miss every day.
So, remember that big $12 you were expecting from the Google+ class action suit? Well, about that...
Hope you saved room for taco — that one, singular taco you can now afford
It might feel like Google+ has been dead for half a decade, but actually, it only shut down back in 2019 in response to several privacy-related issues and bugs. A class-action lawsuit filed by affected users followed shortly after that, and last summer, we finally started to hear about a settlement. While the payout number previously floated sounded small, the new amount makes the old one look like a jackpot.
Google+ is long dead — so why is a 'GooglePlusBot' trying to log in to your accounts?
More Instagram drama
Google+ has left behind one heck of a contentious legacy, and either you still miss the platform to this day or you couldn't say goodbye quickly enough to the social network Google seemingly forced upon you. But no matter where your feelings for it lie, we can all agree that Google+ is dead and gone — right? Well, we just saw some surprising signs of it sticking around in the Phone app, and now we're looking into why you might be getting email warnings about some GooglePlusBot messing around with your accounts.
Google+, now dead for years, is somehow still lingering around Google's Phone app
It's been over 2 years since Google+ shut down for personal accounts
If you've been on the internet for a while, you probably know about Google+ — Google's failed attempt at creating a social network. While the network closed shop for personal accounts in 2019, its remnants still live and break functionality in the Google Phone app for Android.
Google+ users may be entitled to a whopping $12 cash settlement due to privacy issues
The company reached a $7.5 million settlement for the class-action lawsuit earlier this year
Remember Google+? Google's failed social network shut down in 2019 amidst the discovery of multiple privacy-related issues. A class-action lawsuit was filed at the time, and now it looks like that's coming to fruition. Some former members of the service have received an email inviting them to file a claim for a payout of up to — wait for it — $12.
Whether the Google Seattle team is just saddened by the loss of a few dear old services or in the mood for a spooky Halloween season is up for debate, but on its campus, a cemetery of old, dead Google products has popped up. Rather than induce shivers of fear in onlookers, it probably triggers nostalgia and sadness.
After nearly 8 years in service, Google has called time on its social network effort, Google+. By now, any user that might have had some worthwhile memories on the platform should have downloaded their data — yesterday was the last day to do so. But from the last day to the first, the site was mired with challenges through and through.
Google announced its plans to sunset its Google+ social media network for consumers on a sour note in October. The platform, which has a small but dedicated user-base, decided to shut down following Google's acknowledgement of a data exposure that affected up to 500,000 Google+ profiles. Shortly after, in December, the shutdown timeline was expedited due to another, larger bug that had the potential to reveal private user information and impacted approximately 52.5 million users. Now, the company has detailed its shutdown timeline for the consumer version of Google+ — and it's not wasting any time.
Every week, I examine somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred app updates while looking for changes. The most interesting things turn into APK Teardowns or Download posts. Many of the remaining updates are unremarkable, amounting to a few bug fixes, routine updates to libraries, or even just pixel-level adjustments to layouts and images. However, there are usually a few updates that land somewhere in between. I don't want to spam readers with dozens of short posts, but I hate to ignore things that people might want to know about, so I'm going to wrap up the leftovers for a little weekend reading and call it Update Notes.
Google+ may have fallen out of the spotlight, but we've seen one update after another in the last few months that point to what may turn out to be a really significant revision to the social network. There have been signs for new formatting capabilities, a title layout, and even bookmarking posts to revisit later. The latest update speaks to yet another new feature that may allow for a new type of customizable stream.
A new update to Google+ struck yesterday, but it doesn't appear to include any visible changes. However, a look through the APK points to a new built-in feature for bookmarking posts to open again in the future. There's also a warning that Events are likely to be shut down sometime soon, and one line raises some questions about the upcoming titles feature.
No social network has been as equally loved and hated as Google+. Those who use it appreciate the tight community and fruitful discussions, those who don't use it see no reason whatsoever to start doing so and deride its many shortfalls. Plus, both the spam propagation and the lack of meaningful development haven't helped its case lately. But nothing has sounded the alarm bells of Google+'s slow demise into pointlessness as much as one of Google's own entities deciding to abandon the platform for good.
The social networking service that everyone loves to hate has actually made some decent strides over the past year or so on both the web and Android in terms of convenience and usability. A cohesive user experience is probably not what Google+ needs most in its quest for mainstream relevance, but it can’t hurt to try new things.
A few weeks ago, it became clear that Google+ is headed toward a pretty major overhaul to the post editor that would bring support for new formatting and styling options for text. The latest update brings clues that this isn't where the new features will stop. It looks like Google+ may also add separate titles to posts and also integrate with Google Drive for attachments and that will include previews.
Google told us about a great many things at I/O that are coming to many different products across the Google family, but one big service wasn't mentioned: Google+. We've been waiting for a while to see some changes in the company's only true social network, and now there's actually something to look forward to. A teardown of the APK points to a significant enhancement to the text formatting features already available to users.
With all the different apps and services Google offers, you've got no shortage of choices for how to get in touch with people, ranging from a simple email to a video call. And while all those options let us pick the most appropriate method for a given circumstance, sometimes accessing a particular one isn't as streamlined as we'd hope it would be — and that's especially true when we're looking at the intersection between more than one of these services. Today we're hoping to shed a little light on one of the less-intuitive corners of Google's communication infrastructure, as we check out how to send Hangouts messages through Google+.
Until recently, only two notification levels were possible for Google+ communities and collections you're subscribed to: on or off. Thankfully, someone at Google has realized how frustrating it is to only get all notifications or none at all, and a new Highlights option has just been introduced.
A new version of Google+ is rolling out, but unlike many recent releases, this one has at least one immediately visible change after updating. The UI is taking on a whiter look for some of its key UI elements. A teardown also reveals that a Highlights section is coming back and will optionally make an appearance in notifications.
Google+ may have fallen off the radar for most people, but it's actually been improving a lot over the last year. The social network used to have a bit of a problem with spam, but Google's been all-out in providing new tools for moderating content. From our vantage, it seems to be making a difference, and now Google is investing even more development into the platform. Leo Deegan, the engineering manager for Google+, has just announced that the company will soon release a "brand new version" of the app. Though it might look and behave similarly, expect significant changes under the hood.
Most updates to the Google+ app tend to fit the "bug fixes and performance improvements" theme, but last month's release of v9.20 did bring custom notification channels for Android 8.0 Oreo – but maybe not the ones we needed. Today's bump to v9.23 makes a similarly subtle addition with support for a slightly older OS feature: App Shortcuts. If you're running on 7.1 Nougat or above, or using a custom launcher with support for static app shortcuts, you'll now have the option to quickly start a few different types of Google+ posts directly from your launcher.