The End of Google+ Is Announced

Or, as Archie Bunker once put it, "Well, ain't that a kick in the groan?"

Google is using a significant (but not, from what I've read, all that important [1]) security breech on Google+ to pull the plug on the consumer (non-corporate) version of the product, announcing a 10-month wind-down to end in August.

While long lambasted by critics as a "ghost town," I've always found G+ to be a flourishing community full of people to chat with, argue with, inveigh against, learn from, communicate with. As of this afternoon, my "Geekery and Nerditude" collection of posts shows nearly 17K followers [2]. My "Serious Stuff" and "Family & Personal Potpourri" and just my general account show 2600 or so followers.

I've been on G+ since it opened — a refugee (ironically enough) of their shutdown of Google Reader in its favor. And, to be sure, I've ended up talking with more a different people, geeking out with more folk over stuff, getting into deeper and more challenging political discussions, and overall being more engaged and getting more engagement than the Reader universe ever gave me.

After being super-hyped as a Facebook competitor, and forceably integrated into everything under the sun that Google offered, the company switched course after it didn't kill off (or beat) FB in numbers (though the numbers seemed pretty decent), yoinked out all sorts of integration and features (Hangouts integration, Events, G+ Photos shifted to a separate product), and, despite a top-to-bottom code rewrite (that got mixed reviews) seemed to abandon the product to just do its thing.

Predictions of G+ being gacked by Google have been floating around for years. The breach gives them the apparently public cover to do so, though it's obviously not driven by that since they're taking 10 months to shut things down.

The question for me becomes where to go next with my blogging — not something I need to decide immediately, obviously, but likely sooner than 10 months.

Facebook is out. It's just not the place for all that I want to do, I find the interface awful, and, frankly, all my high school friends don't want to hear my political screeds.

It's also a PitA to get data out of. Everything I've done in G+ I've been able to mirror back to my WordPress blog; I put not my faith in princes, nor in any platform to every exist except what I maintain myself, so without being able to get FB posts (and comments thereto) somehow extracted and safe, then even if FB had a pristine security and privacy network (which it plainly does not), it's not for me.

The other major alternative seems to be Twitter — which has some possibilities, and the volume of users to be attractive. Extracting data is still something of a challenge, though, and even with 280 characters, I'm not sure it's for me.

I'm seeing and following along a lot of other recommendations, though most of them seem to be passingly small and isolated. I don't want that.

Heck, if worse comes to worse, I'll just go back to blogging on WordPress and sending excerpts elsewhere to draw in traffic. I know that will knock engagement down a heck of a lot, but it's not clear to me there are a lot of other alternatives on the way.

Sigh.

——

[1] Profiles were exposed, to the extent that followers and circles and the like seem to have been accessed, but not in a way that there's a sign anything was done with. Post content does not seem to have been broken into.
[2] Which doesn't mean there are 17K reading my posts there very day, but that's still a not for nothing number.