If you’re one of those folks (like me) that embraced Google+ when it started out, you may have been surprised (like me) when the company announced it was shutting down. It was an ambitious project for the internet giant, but they admitted defeat in October. People, it seemed, just didn’t spend much time there.
“The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.” – Google blog post
It didn’t help matter when user data may have been compromised, or another bug impacted 53.5 million users. Google decided to shut down the service even earlier than anticipated. So… by the end of April, Google+ will be gone.
But, wait! A group of fanatical volunteers (as they call themselves) is taking the time to archive most all public content on Google+. The project has already started by the Archive Team that works with the Internet Archive. It’s related, but different.
“Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions – and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever” – The Archive Team
One project you may be familiar with is the Wayback Machine, which lets you go back in time and view websites at key dates in the past (often all the way back to their origins). It’s some of the same folks that keep that going.
Here’s how it impact you, according to the thread on Reddit:
How does this affect you as a Google+ user?
If you do absolutely nothing, there is a very good chance that much of your public Google+ content will be preserved by Archive Team, on the Internet Archive, and will be publicly visible there.
If you do want this to happen … you’re in luck. Don’t delete your Google+ content or profile and it should be saved.
If you don’t want this to happen, you can request removal of specific items through the Internet Archive’s procedure:https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayback-Machine-General-Information and https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360018138951-How-do-I-remove-an-item-page-from-the-site-