Social networks come and go all the time, but few of them debut with backing from a company as big as Google. Google+ first launched in 2011, with the company seeking to leverage its status as the world’s most visited website to position itself as competition to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Google did everything it could to tie as many of its services as possible to Google+ in a desperate bid to get people to use it, but ultimately, it didn’t catch on, and it ended up being discontinued for consumers in 2019. A retooled version of the social network was kept around for business users, now named Google Currents. But even that’s going away, too — meaning the last remaining crumbs of Google+ will be officially gone in a matter of months.
The end of Currents is fast approaching, as Google shares that the service will be shut down on July 5th (via Chrome Unboxed). Hopefully, this heads-up gives users plenty of time to move off the platform. The wind-down was previously announced, but Google hadn’t set an exact date — now we have one.
In its place, Google is replacing the service with Chat Spaces, a feature of one of its newer communication tools, Google Chat. The company is transitioning existing communities in Currents to spaces in Chat, so if you used the former for your company, you’ll soon be getting accustomed to the latter.
While Google is aiming to make the process as painless as possible, and it’s porting many of the features in Currents over to Chat to ease things even further, this is still a fundamentally different experience. While Currents keeps a lot of the older Google+ DNA, with its UX resembling a social network, Chat is a messaging app à la Slack or Discord. The experience will understandably be focused around messaging, so regardless of how many Currents features are ported over to Chat, there’s still going to be a big adjustment. Instead of commenting on a post, you’ll be posting a threaded reply to a message. Or instead of reacting to a post, you’ll be reacting to messages or replies.
Google’s support page has plenty of illustrative GIFs showing you how things you used to do in Currents will work in Chat, so you should definitely check it out if you’re about to be subject to this transition. If you’re not, you can always reminisce about your time with Google+, and pay your respects to its second, and final, demise.
