Google to Purge Some Google+ Pages Next Week
posted Saturday Jul 25, 2015 by Scott Ertz
Next week will see the end of a lot of content on Google's mostly abandoned social network Google+. Since mostly only Google employees seem to use the site, Friday will see the last day for of Google+ Photos, being replaced by Google Photos, a disconnected service more similar to Picasa than Google+. This is good news for people who actually want to use Google to store photos without having to deal with all of the annoyances of Google+.
This isn't the only content that will evaporate within the week, however. Google announced to many regular content creators that they intend to remove a large collection of Google+ Local business pages. In a desperate attempt to make people care about Google+, the company began creating Google+ Local business pages for every company in their database. Most of these pages were never used, as most of the pages were never actually claimed by the business owners.
Dear photographers and agencies,
In the past few months, you may have seen some changes in the look of Google+ pages that have been associated with Google My Business (GMB) accounts. These changes, including how we treat business pages without owners, are part of Google's ongoing effort to simplify people's experience with our tools. We are constantly working to provide only valuable and rich content to our users.
On July 28th, Google will begin shutting down those GMB-associated Google+ pages that have not been associated with user accounts and are also not verified. You may find that some of your Business View tours also sit on such pages, but note that after their removal of unverified Google+ pages, the Business View tours will still remain available on Google Maps and Google Search.
What this means is that, if you are one of the few people who use Google+ to find local companies, the only ones you will discover are those who are active on the network. Instead, to discover local business, Google recommends its official local search capabilities, mostly Google Maps. This is the final step in Google's separation of Local and Google+, which has been in progress as long as Photos. It also likely signs the death certificate for the social network.
As of now, the only features that remain in Google+ are the feed, which would be useful if people posted things there, and the groups capability, which is better implemented through Google Groups than it ever was in Google+ anyway.
