So Google+ actually died last week. April 2nd, if you want the exact date, which is fitting because nobody was going to remember it otherwise. I'd been putting off doing anything about it for months because Google kept sending those "your content will be deleted" emails and I kept archiving them straight into a folder I never open. But Sunday night I couldn't sleep, so I finally ran the Takeout export and sat there watching a progress bar for twenty-five minutes while it zipped up seven-ish years of a social network almost nobody I know ever used.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about downloading your Google+ data: most of it is embarrassing in a very specific, very boring way. Not "delete this before mom sees it" embarrassing. More like finding a shoebox of ticket stubs from movies you don't remember seeing. I had 340-some posts. Maybe six of them got a comment from an actual human. The rest is me, in 2012 and 2013, sharing tech articles into a void with captions like "this is huge" and "everyone needs to read this," presumably because Google+ Communities felt like the future of the internet for about eighteen months there. I was wrong about that, obviously, but I wasnt alone.
What actually surprised me was the Circles data. I'd completely forgotten Google+ organized your contacts that way instead of just dumping everyone into one undifferentiated pile like Facebook does. I had a circle called "Actual Friends," a circle called "Tech People," and, I kid you not, a circle called "People I Met At That One Conference." That last one has fourteen people in it and I genuinely could not tell you the name of the conference. The export just gives you the circle names and member lists as a JSON file, which is not exactly a nostalgia trip when you're staring at raw key-value pairs at 1am, but it did the job.
If you want to do this yourself before the servers actually go dark:
Google says the full consumer shutdown, meaning your data actually gets deleted rather than just hidden, doesn't finish until sometime this summer, so there's still a window. Go to takeout.google.com, deselect everything except Google+ Stream, Google+ Circles, and Google+ Communities and Collections (unless you actually want your Photos and Drive in there too, which will make the export enormous), pick a delivery method, and wait for the email. Mine came as a single zip under 40MB, which tells you everything about how much I actually posted. Your mileage will vary a lot if you were one of the people who used Communities seriously, since apparently some of those had genuinely active niche discussions going, mostly around photography and Android modding from what I've read.
Small tangent, but the same week this was happening I was also trying to buy Endgame tickets the day they went on sale and Fandango just face-planted for a good chunk of the afternoon. AMC's app wasnt much better. Funny how we can build a system to warn seven years of users individually about an account shutdown with months of lead time, but a ticketing site still can't survive one very predictable Tuesday of demand. Different companies, different problems, I know, but it's the kind of contrast that sticks with you.
Anyway. I'm not going to pretend I'm sad Google+ is gone in any meaningful way, because I stopped opening it around 2014 and only remembered it existed when the breach story broke last October. But going through the export did make me a little wistful for the version of the internet where a company would just launch a whole social network as a shot across Facebook's bow and mostly fail at it in public, slowly, over seven years, instead of quietly killing things after six months like Google usually does now. Say what you want about Google+, it at least got a proper burial.
If you've got old accounts sitting around from services that clearly aren't long for this world, this is as good a nudge as any to go grab your data now instead of finding out the hard way that the export button disappeared along with everything else. Ask me how I know about that one.