Google+ Officially Closed Due to Software Faults and Poor User Retention

Google’s social media platform Google+ has been shut down, after almost eight years trying to take on Facebook and Twitter.

The decision was made in October last year following a review of how much access third party apps had to data. It was found that almost half a million users had their information visible to other companies, even though it was marked as private.

A ten month transition period was scheduled, with the platform expected to become completely unavailable in August 2019. However, the closure was brought forward by four months at the end of 2018 after another bug was discovered, this time potentially affecting as many as 52.5 million users.

Low user retention has also been cited as a reason for the platform being discontinued. In-house data showed that 90% of Google+ sessions lasted less than five seconds.

Social media consultant Matt Navarra told the BBC: “Google+ was destined to fail from day one.

“Issues with an unwieldy and changeable UI, being the latecomer versus giants like Facebook, a disjointed user experience, and rumours of internal disagreements about how Google+ would be leveraged [all affected the platform]”.

Google+ has now been added to the Google Cemetery, a web page documenting all of the tech giant’s discontinued products.

Paul Frantz, an Industry Director at Google, recently published a guest post on GDI analysing current Gen Z online dating trends.

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