Following the disclosure of data breaches and disappointing public support for the platform, Google has announced that it will close down Google+ for consumers in April 2019. Google will, however, continue to offer private Google+ powered networks for those businesses that currently use the platform.
To quote Ben Smith, Google Fellow and VP of Engineering at Google: “It has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user interaction with apps.” Click here to read the full official Google post in which he has written – entitled “Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+”
Our view – For some reason, from the very beginning of its existence in 2011, there was a lot of confusion for many businesses regarding Google+. Perhaps they felt that there were already arguably too many social networks to have to deal with. So what could the value be of Google+ ? What would make it worth adding onto the list? We originally found good reasons to answer these questions and for a while the social networking platform seemed to be gaining ground. 
According to one global index, there was at one point 25% of the world’s Internet users actively using Google+. So it meant that your customers and also your competitors might be using it when you were not.
Alas, the sun is to set on this platform. In some ways it is a pity – one of the upsides of Google+ that we liked was the variety of “Communities” which people had started to build, showing the amazing diversity of interests that people have. Amongst these:
Just goes to show that not even Google gets it right all the time.