So Google finally admitted this week that Google+ has been quietly leaking peoples profile data since 2015, and instead of just patching the bug they're killing the whole consumer product off. The blog post went up Monday, they're calling it "Project Strobe," and the short version is: an API bug let outside developers pull profile fields — name, email, occupation, age, that kind of thing — for something like 500,000 accounts, and it went unnoticed for around three years. Google says they found no evidence anyone actually misused it, which is the kind of sentence companies say right before they announce they're shutting the thing down anyway. Consumer Google+ is going away by next August.
I hadn't logged into Google+ in probably four years, so naturally the first thing I did after reading the news was go dig through my old account like it was a shoebox in the attic.
Turns out I made my profile in the summer of 2011, a few months before I even started this blog, back when Google was strong-arming everyone into it through Gmail chat invites and that weird "you have been added to someone's circles" notification that showed up whether you wanted it or not. I remember being mildly excited about Circles as a concept, the idea that you could sort people into groups instead of the flat Facebook friend list, and then never actually using it that way because sorting people into groups is exhausting and nobody else was doing it either.
My oldest surviving post is from March 2012, a link to some article about SOPA with a two-sentence hot take that reads like it was written by a slightly younger, slightly angrier version of me. There's a post from later that year complaining about the Nexus 7 screen resolution. There's an entire thread, maybe eleven comments deep, arguing with a guy I've never met about whether RSS was actually dying (it was already dying, I was wrong, Reader got the axe the following year and that argument aged very badly for me). Reading through it is genuinely a little embarrassing but also kind of nice, in the way old notebooks are nice.
Anyway, before the whole thing gets deleted, if you had a Google+ account and want your stuff, go use Google Takeout and export it now rather than waiting until next summer when everyone remembers at once and the servers get slammed. Takes about ten minutes to set up and it drops a zip file with your posts, photos, and circles data. I did it this morning mostly out of curiosity, not because I actually want any of that content back, but because deleting something without ever having a copy of it feels wrong on principle, even when the something is seven years of half-baked hot takes nobody read.
Separate but related complaint I'll get off my chest here: Google has an actual pattern now of building something, getting a modest but genuinely attached user base, and then walking away from it a few years later: Reader, Wave, Inbox is clearly circling the drain too even if they haven't said it out loud yet. Google+ never had the modest attached user base part, it was mostly spam accounts and forced sign-ins, so this one is less of a loss than the others. But it's the same pattern, and if you're the kind of person who builds your workflow around a Google product, October 2018 is a fine time to start hedging your bets a little.
Small tangent since it happened the same week: Google also did their hardware event yesterday and put out the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, plus the Pixel Slate tablet and a smaller Home Hub speaker-with-a-screen thing. The Pixel 3 XL has this enormous notch cut into the top of the screen and the tech press is already split down the middle on it: half the reviews call it fine since you barely notice it in use, the other half act personally offended by it. I haven't held one yet so I won't pretend to have a real opinion, except to say that a notch on a phone that isn't an iPhone still looks a little bit like someone's answering someone else's homework.
Going to go back through a couple more years of that G+ archive tonight before it's gone. Mostly to see how many times 2013-me used the word "disruptive" unironically.