An earlier social networking site from Google, introduced in 2011. In 2015, the chat, video calling and photos services in Google+ were separated out (see
Google Hangouts and
Google Photos).
Although Google+ never achieved Facebook's market share, users ranked it favorably. In 2018, Google announced the end of Google+ because of a data vulnerability discovered that year exposing the data of a half million users. However, it was not known if any data were actually breached. Google+ was replaced with Google Currents for Google Workspace users only and not for personal accounts (see
Google Currents).
Circles
Friends and families were stored in Circles, which displayed as circular icons on screen. In order to better engineer privacy and who sees what, all posts, photos and invitations were shared by dragging them into the appropriate Circle, which remembered the last selection. Friends, Acquaintances, Family and Following (whom you follow) were the defaults, but any Circle could be created. See
Google+ Ripples,
Google+ Sparks and
Google.