The search engine giant that dominates the internet has stumbled over its most recent failure: the social media platform Google Plus. As Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, decided to shut down Google Plus by August 2019, they soon faced criticism. Odds are, most people aren’t fazed by its shutdown.
When Google Plus originated in 2010, it was intended to contend with Facebook as a social media platform. At its core, according to the website Raka, Google Plus had three advantages: it optimized business listings, it was another way to rank websites (so when people search, there’s a better chance your site will appear sooner than others) and it was another way to connect—either personally or professionally.
Evidently, something went wrong. As of 2016, 91 percent of Google Plus accounts were empty. That implies they were either spam or never active. If that’s not depressing enough, the platform had approximately 34 million monthly visitors and 395 million active accounts. Facebook has two billion monthly users.
When looking at the numbers, it’s no surprise Google decided to call it quits. It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly lead to its downfall. Motivation of competition and the desire to beat Facebook at their own game certainly played into it. They were late to the market and trying to catch up. Beyond that, it isn’t very user friendly. Once on Google Plus, it’s difficult to understand what exactly the main function of the platform is.
Viewing it as a surrender, Google begrudgingly sat out of the social media starting lineup. In accordance with Google Plus’s descent, it was also uncovered that Google had exposed the data of over 500,000 users this past spring and decided to keep the information private. According to the Wall Street Journal, they didn’t disclose it because they feared it would damage their reputation. Clearly Google forgets how strong their platform is.
This software glitch gave outside developers potential access to private Google Plus data. From 2015 to March of 2018, this went unpublicized. Alphabet claims that none of the data was misused, yet they failed to look into the bug until 2018. This lack of knowledge and blindfolding of its users is what ultimately hindered Google’s reputation. In keeping quiet, it formed distrust amongst people and had the potential to set Google back as far as Facebook’s bug did.
Let this be a wakeup call to all businesses: not only is it a terrible idea to hide certain information from the consumers, but it’s probably not the best idea to compete against companies with well established social media platforms—particularly if the idea is more or less the same.
