I remember when Google+ was new, and still in closed beta. Everyone I knew was excited for it, even the tech-illiterate Facebook moms and grandparents. But it was invite-only for so long that people lost interest by the time it opened to the public. In the end only a handful of my school friends signed up, and we all abandoned it after a couple weeks. Its design felt sleek and modern at the time but it wasn't that much better than Facebook. It may have failed as a Facebook replacement but it's still in heavy use among certain communities, especially tech (Linux and Android). Linus Torvalds, for example, used it as his main public-facing social media (though he seems to have stopped early this year). A lot of groups on there are thriving and are gonna be hit hard by this. Still, I was wondering if/when it would be shut down just a couple days ago. They were pushing it so hard for a while that shutting down seems like an admission of defeat, even if they abandoned their G+ centric strategy a long time ago.