Google Plus

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Google+ (AKA Google Plus, GPlus, or G+) is a social content hosting silo operated by Google and shuts down 2019-04-02 (export your data ASAP, may take “hours or possibly days”), and was also formerly a centralized Google identity service (since transitioned to Google Identity Platform).

On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!

Export NOW

To export your data before 2019-04-02 (Google recommends getting started before March 31, 2019, because creating the export may take “hours or possibly days”), see details below or visit https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1045788?hl=en&authuser=0

Shutdown

https://plus.google.com/ has a yellow banner at the top stating:

Your Google+ account is going away April 2, 2019. Downloading your Google+ content may take time, so get started before March 31, 2019.

Google announced an expedited shutdown date of April 2019 for the consumer version. The initial shutdown date was August 2019.

How to

How to export your data

Google Takeout lets you download a zip with all of your Google+ posts, comments, pictures, etc. It's not linked directly from anywhere within Google+, and doesn't come up as a first search result for common queries, but works fantastically (if a bit slow).

How to POSSE to

It is likely all of this will be irrelevant as of 2019-04-02 when Google+ shuts down for consumers.

Section kept for historical reasons until then.

There's currently no good way to automatically POSSE to Google+. Here are the (bad) options:

Why POSSE to

Since Google+ is shutting down 2019-04-02, there is little need to bother with POSSEing to it.

This section is kept here for historical purposes until the shutdown occurs.

There is some evidence that Google+ "+1"s on links affect their search ranking:

POSSEing links of your posts to Google+ may help increase +1s on them and thus increase their search ranking.

IndieWeb POSSE Examples

Will Norris

In Outsourcing comments to Google+, 2011 IndieWebCamp participant Will Norris explains how he uses

to manually create links to his blog posts on Google+ where he then accepts comments (instead of comments on his own blog).

This isn't a full POSSE implementation (which would be cross-posting the entirety of the contents of your blog posts to G+ posts), but rather just a way to manually share links/summaries of your original posts onto G+, similar to POSSEing articles to Twitter.

Past POSSE Examples

Kartik Prabhu

Kartik Prabhu manually POSSEd posts and replies to Google+ from 2014-05-26 until 2018-02-18, and has stopped.

Last POSSE 2018-02-18:

Google+ does not have URL permalinks for replies but does have an id attribute in the div. I copy the id to generate a syndication URL for my replies. Of course, G+ is kind enough to use javascript and ignore the id in the URL when the page is visited!

Features

API

Google+ has a proprietary read API.

+1 Button

Main article: +1 Button

Google+ allows you to put a "+1" button on any page that when clicked, does a "+1" (similar to a like) of your page, inside Google+, on the Google+ profile of whoever clicked the button.

Activities

Google+ has a proprietary Activities API that is based on (but not actually) ActivityStreams:

Google Search Integration

Google had integrated Google+ across many of their services, e.g. even Google's search shows a toolbar for it when signed into Google+.

Brainstorming

How to delete your account

TBD.

Has anyone deleted their G+ account? What's the process? How long do they hold your data anyway? Etc.

See also: delete your account

POSSE Events

Anecdotally there seems to be more interaction on G+ event posts than simple text posts.

If we can figure out a way to automatically create event posts on G+, it might be worth POSSEing indieweb event posts to G+.

Searchability

It's not obvious how to best publish/POSSE to or comment on G+ in a way that is most easily searchable / findable. Here are some tips:

  • only post public posts to G+
  • ...

Issues

Lack of comment permalinks

Comments on Google+ lack their own permalinks, making it very difficult to reference a part of a conversation on a Google+ post.

It's apparently a "Known feature request that's never made it to the head of the priority queue." according to:

See also:

Similarly when asked at the 2013 Google I/O conference, Google+ representatives relayed the same message that it's a known feature request and there are still no plans for it.

Occasional IndieAuth login problems

Ben Roberts had used Google+ for login via IndieAuth primarily until there were intermittent failings due to errors in redirects. For example https://plus.google.com/113259788317081930920/posts redirects to https://plus.google.com/+BenRoberts83/posts but Google will occasionally change/break this routing.

See Also

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