How and why is Google+ still a thing?

Google Plus is the Marmite of social networks.

People who use it like it. People who don't use it ... well, they don't.









This is what's known as confirmation bias.

"The tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses."
Those people probably all give GooglePlus a bit of a go when it launched. ...
  • Created a profile at launch.
  • Followed a handful of friends.
  • ... made a handful of posts.
  • Scratched their heads.
Then:
  • Uninstalled the App.
  • Left. 
This explains why many people think GooglePlus shouldn't exist. If you don't use something and nether do the people you know, then your tendency is to believe that no-one uses it!

Who uses GooglePlus?

GooglePlus is a small network in relative terms. 

What that means is that compared to something like Facebook's 1.8 billion or so active users GooglePlus has a smaller active user base. No usage numbers are released by Google, but active users are likely to be in the region of several hundreds of millions.

Hundreds of millions of users is not a small number, it's just a small number relative to a billion.

What is GooglePlus? Will it get shut down?

People who don't use GooglePlus are often surprised that it is STILL around ...  will GooglePlus be shut down? No.

If GooglePlus was just a small social network one could make an assumption that it might be shut down, but that assumption is ill-formed as it does not take into account what GooglePlus actually is.

Towards the end of 2016 GooglePlus became a core G-Suite service.


Many of G Suite's paying customers use GooglePlus as an internal social network.

G-Suite paying customers can allow their employees to use GooglePlus in a number of different ways according to their business needs: from restricting their users to internal communication only, to allowing some departments: PR and marketing teams for example, to be able to post "inside" and "outside" of their domain.

As a core part of G Suite GooglePlus competes with things like Slack and Facebook Workplace.

So in essence the GooglePlus I use is a cooperate network and a public network, which offers private and public communication, which is funded by paying G Suite customers.

How you might (or might not) use GooglePlus depends on whether you are using your private account, or an account that has been provided for you to use but is owned and managed by the corporation, business or educational facility that you belong to.

TL;DR
  • You might not use GooglePlus, but millions of people do. 
  • GooglePlus is a paid business product, which is why it is Ad free. 
If you tried GooglePlus at launch and gave up a lot has changed since then.

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