Google+ was Google’s attempt at a social network that had a few interesting ideas, but ultimately wasn’t popular enough to keep around. Google+ has continued to live on in a slightly different form, but that will end soon.
Google said last year that it would shut down its current Currents service sometime in 2023, and now the company has shared a more specific end date: July 5, 2023. Currents is a social media platform designed for internal use by companies and other organizations with Google Workspace plans. It evolved from Google+ for G Suite, which was a slightly-modified version of the publicly-available Google+ network.
Google+ was first introduced in 2011, and the public version was shut down in 2019 due to low use. However, the Google Workspace/G Suite version continued to live on as a messaging board for companies and organizations. In July 2020, Google upgraded it to Currents, which retained the same core functionality but with an updated design and new sorting options.
More recently, Google has been moving the features of Currents to Google Chat, the company’s competitor to Slack and Microsoft Teams. Now that most of that work is done, Google is ready to shut down Currents, ending the lineage of Google+ once and for all.
Google said in a blog post, “Beginning July 5, 2023, Currents will no longer be available. Workspace administrators can export Currents data using Takeout before August 8, 2023. Beginning August 8th, Currents data will no longer be available for download. Although we are saying goodbye to Currents, we continue to invest in new features for Google Chat, so teams can connect and collaborate with a shared sense of belonging.”
Even though Google+ for G Suite and Currents were never available to the public, it still feels like the end of an era. Google+ was one of the company’s most ambitious projects, giving Facebook a run for its money and annoying countless people with its YouTube integration.
Source: Google Workspace Updates
