Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

At the end of June 2011, Google+ was born as the most powerful sniper of Facebook, with the privacy function as the main distinguishing point between the two; in October 2018, Google+ was revealed to have a major privacy leak, and the consumer version was announced to have only 10 months to live.

Google+ considered privacy issues from the first day it was conceived, and privacy security issues, which hastened the demise of what was once the world's second largest social networking platform.

After the failure of Google Wave and Google Buzz, Google began to reorient its products to user privacy control, while Facebook had long been the largest social network in the world, but privacy issues had begun to emerge.

In 2011, an article in the New York Times said: Google+ is more private than Facebook. One of the points mentioned is that many functions of Facebook are enabled by default, which may cause you to share content that everyone can see by default, and you may not be aware that if you want to turn it off, the Facebook function menu may cause you to collapse. On the other hand, it is easier for users to take the initiative to choose whether the content is public or not, and can share the content in different circles (the current Google+ strategy may have changed).

It turns out that Google+ 's strategy is correct. Facebook has long been plagued by privacy issues, including the most sensational Cambridge data leak in 2018. Many people believe that the reason why users are still stuck in Facebook is that for a long time, there is no suitable platform to replace Facebook.

The Google+ website service was officially launched on June 28, 2011 and can only be registered by invitation for nearly three months. With the huge number of users of Google itself, coupled with the means of inviting registration, it has aroused the appetite of many people. The number of users exceeded 20 million in just 24 days, and it took 1152 days for Facebook and 1035 days for Twitter to achieve this.

So we would say that Google has a unique advantage in socializing, and Google+ is considered to be the most likely competitor to surpass Facebook, and I think Google himself thinks so. Google has stressed that there are real market opportunities for products that are concerned about privacy and the way users share information. In view of the confusion and complexity of user group rent management and privacy control in Facebook and Twitter, Google+ has made some targeted changes, among which the circle function is the most concerned.

A month after the launch of Google+, an article "5 things Google+ does better than Facebook and Twitter" on VentureBeat listed five better features of Google+ than Facebook and Twitter, the first of which was the circle.

This feature allows users to manage people they follow and topics they share. With the circle feature, users can send status updates to specific groups. For example, a user can create a circle of friends who like music, so he can only share the music videos he has just created.

Facebook and Twitter also offer selective sharing, but their functions are a bit confusing. Users can block updates to a group on Facebook, but it really takes a lot of time to implement. For Twitter, users have no choice but to make their profiles fully public or completely private.

All in Google+

At this point, we have to feel sorry again, Google+ holds a good card, but the result of the "four 2s to take the two kings" out. The first decision made by Google+, which seems to value privacy, was to require real-name registration.

To make it easier to find acquaintances, Google+ requires you to register with your real name. A user has signed up with his own game nickname. Google cancels his account and tells him that he needs to create an account using his real name. To make matters worse, the personal information of real-name registered users is displayed directly on the Google+ home page, and their real names are also displayed when making comments. This behavior, which is regarded by users as ignoring privacy, made many privacy-conscious users stay away from Google+, and it was not until three years later that the real-name registration was officially cancelled.

Google+ does solve the privacy problems of Facebook and Twitter in some aspects, but for a long time users do not regard it as a qualified social platform to accept it. In addition to dealing with the intrusion of Facebook, Google has been trying to build a product that makes it easier to establish connections between users and enhance user stickiness. After the rejection of the attempt to buy Facebook, the birth of Google+ is inevitable, in which case, we can understand the reason for Google+ 's fatal mistake.

It may be that the beginning is too dreamy, which makes Google more confident in Google+ and tries to direct users of other Google products to Google+. So, in October 2011, Google announced the integration of Google Reader and Google+ and removed all social functions under Google Reader. As a result, after Google Reader posted content and shared content, you had to visit Google+ to see it. This move caused a lot of dissatisfaction among users and, to some extent, lost the character saved by Google Reader, a conscientious product.

It's not over yet. In early 2012, Google launched a new strategy that requires users to fill in their Google+ account information when signing up for products such as Gmail, which means they will also become Google+ users. For a time, many users were "forced" to sign up for Google+, which also made Google+ a "ghost town" with a large number of zombie users.

Similar measures are most severely resisted by Youtube users. In November 2013, Google integrated the Youtube comment system with Google+, while more Youtube users wanted their comments under the video to be anonymous, so more than 175000 people jointly launched a signature campaign to restore the original comment mechanism.

Even if it's as good as Google, it can't go against public opinion. Google abolished these mandatory rules in 2014, and new users are no longer forced to sign up for Google+ accounts. Over the past three years, Google+ has taken good privacy control as the starting point, but in order to rush to push Google+ to make repeated mistakes, touching the sensitive zone of user privacy, it is far from being able to compare with mature social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in terms of social functions. Google chose to compromise under the resistance of users and accepted the failure of Google+ to a certain extent.

Originally, Google launched Google+ relatively late, but in the past three years, Google+ has been repeatedly frustrated because of its failure to control the boundaries of user privacy, and even triggered a lot of user resistance. Some analysts believe that in the three years when Google+ was bent on catching up with Facebook, Google missed the best opportunity for mobile social outbreaks, watching the rise of mobile social tools such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, rather than Google+.

2014 became a watershed for Google+, taking on the important task of Google's entry into the social field in the first three years. Looking at the difference between the name and Google with only one symbol, you can imagine that Google had high hopes. Unexpectedly, the competitor for three years is not Facebook, but users. The game between users and users on privacy issues, repeated enforcement measures, so that users lack the initiative for their own personal information, this is a big taboo.

In April 2014, the departure of Vic Gundotra, the father of Google+, and personnel changes within Google+ made the future of Google+ uncertain. Over the next few years, Google+ has been operating normally, but it has obviously been out of the main line of Google business, and there are no new big moves. Social-oriented Google has only survived for three years.

Privacy disclosure accelerates the destruction of Google+

If it hadn't been for this announcement from Google in October 2018, I think many people would have forgotten that Google+ is still alive, not to mention that Google+ has only three days for Chinese users. According to the announcement issued by Google, the Google+ service for ordinary consumers will be officially offline in August 2019, and the enterprise version can continue to be used, citing the low usage rate of the consumer version and high maintenance costs. The media seems to give the real reason-serious data breaches affect nearly 500000 users.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google leaked the privacy data of nearly 500000 API users because of design flaws, but chose not to report the error, in part because of fears of regulatory scrutiny and reputation damage. Subsequently, Google posted a blog post that basically confirmed the problem of data leakage. It is understood that Google CEO Sundar Pichai had been aware of the failure of user data disclosure, but still decided not to disclose it publicly. Google analysts believe that it would not be appropriate to expose the data of 496951 users before confirming the impact of the API error before it is fixed.

Serious data breach problem + low usage rate, Google+ consumer version was directly sentenced to death. And the matter is not over, after the data leak problem was exposed, Google is suspected of deliberately concealing the loophole, the United States and the European Union have begun to investigate the matter.

In the past seven years of Google+, the social dream of Google, which originally carried Google, was based on privacy security, but it was also quickly out of date due to a number of mandatory policies that ignored users' privacy, and accelerated its destruction process because of privacy leakage, and its social function was only regarded as imitating Facebook. A good card was broken, and Google's social dream was ruined.

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