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Niantic will be setting up their own forums for Ingress and OPR Augmented/ Alternative Reality game developer Niantic (aka Niantic Project ), known for their games #PokémonGO and Ingress ) will be rolling out their own forum solution as replacement for their G+ communities/accounts. Unfortunately it won't be finished yet before June. #SignalFlare #Ingress #Niantic #ContactInformation #MeetingSites #ARG #AugmentedReality #AlternativeReality Originally shared by NIA Ops Agents, we appreciate your patience and understanding as we work on a replacement for Google+. With the official shutdown of Google+ coming next week, we wanted to give you some insight into what we’ve been working on. We will be launching our own Ingress forum to provide you with a centralized place to turn to for official announcements and support, as well as opportunities for you to connect with others in your community. You can expect the same level of access to information directly from Niantic in the form of rel...

Official Android Beta Program Community Moving To Reddit It's interesting they're choosing a non-Google platform, but they certainly could do worse than Reddit. :) #SignalFlare Via Peggy K Originally shared by Andrea Gotschin We're moving to Reddit! We've received a lot of great feedback and insight from all of you on Google+ throughout the previous beta releases. This community has had direct impact in helping us evolve the platform. We look forward to continued lively discussions over on Reddit! https://www.reddit.com/r/android_beta/ While the Android Pie beta is complete, all future announcements and updates on our next Android Beta program will be posted on our new Android Beta Reddit Community! Stay tuned… As a reminder: For questions or issues related the current public stable release of Android Pie, please visit our official Pixel Help Community ( https://support.google.com/pixelphone/community ) Cheers, Andrea on behalf of the Android Beta Team

Blogger added notice regarding Google+ integrations to their admin panel Originally shared by Filip H.F. “FiXato” Slagter Blogger has finally added a notice to its control panel interface The text of the notice reads as follows: Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019.   Google+ widgets:  Support for the '+1 Button', 'Google+ Followers' and 'Google+ Badge' widgets in Layout will no longer be available. All instances of these widgets will be removed from your blog. +1 buttons:  The +1/G+ buttons and Google+ share links below blog posts and in the navigation bar will be removed. Please note that if you have a custom template that includes Google+ features, you may need to update your template. Please contact your template supplier for advice. Google+ Comments:  Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ com...

You have only till February 4th to archive all the comments on your Blogger blogs As mentioned on https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9195133 you have only two to three days left before Blogger blogs no longer include the Google+ Comments on each post: "If you’ve used Google+ for comments on your own or other sites, this feature will be removed from Blogger by February 4th and other sites by March 7th. All your Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2, 2019." See the below reshared post for more details. Originally shared by Filip H.F. “FiXato” Slagter PSA: Google+ Comments for Blogger owners have 3 days to manually archive the comments on all their blog posts Google isn't providing other people's comments to your own Blogger blogs through Google Data Takeout Based on the answers of a moderator of the Google+ Help community, the official community designated by Google for questions regarding the #GooglePlusShutdown in their Jan 30th announce...

For those of you tearing your hairs out at the "Archive Incomplete" error from Google Data Takeout requests. Originally shared by Filip H.F. “FiXato” Slagter A brief PSA regarding 'Archive incomplete' errors on Google Data Takeout Since I see many posts about people just trying over and over by requesting a new archive from Google Data Takeout ( https://takeout.google.com ), in the hopes it will get rid of the "Archive Incomplete" error, and getting frustrated when it still shows up, I thought I'd share my advice on it. It's not necessarily as bad as it sounds Just because it says it's incomplete, doesn't mean that it's couldn't find half your content. In my case, it's (consistently the same) two files that couldn't be included, and they are both actually the same video! Inside your archive is a list of files that Google Data Takeout failed to retrieve! While it's mentioned in expanded section of the list of archives on #G...

My thoughts on Google's Jan 30th announcement, and a timeline overview Originally shared by Filip H.F. “FiXato” Slagter Google finally provided additional details and dates regarding the shutdown of Google+ Below I've included a copy of the official announcement with more information that was provided today, though I would suggest reading the most recent version at: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9195133 I've also included the official F.A.Q. further down the page, but I recommend reading the full, up-to-date version at: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9217723?hl=en&ref_topic=9195238 Most important things (imho) to learn from these documents: • Timeline: ° January 28 (2 days ago): the APIs (used by third party developers to access content from Google+ through programming) will start experiencing intermittent failures. ° February 4th: no longer able to create new Google+ profiles, pages, communities or events ° February 4th: *Google+ for comments will be ...

How the shutdown of Google+ affects Google+ Comments for Blogger While my post here on Google+ is mostly ranting at/about Blogger for not providing a migration path, and being so late with informing its users, the linked article is Blogger's announcement post going into details on how Blogger will be affected by the #GooglePlusShutdown. In short, any comments posted to Blogger blogs using the Google+ Comments system rather than Blogger's original own Comments system, will be lost. +1 and share buttons and related Google+ web integration will also disappear from Blogger. No migration path is provided. Relevant links: Blogger's announcement: https://blogger.googleblog.com/2019/01/an-update-on-google-and-blogger.html Google's announcement: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9195133 Google's F.A.Q.: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9217723 Google's F.A.Q. answer regarding Google+ Comments for Blogger: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9217723#blogger ...

Google Groups no longer a viable alternative for large communities? Note, this is based on the experience and report of a single¹ Google Groups community, so don't take it at face value, but rather use it as a consideration, especially since another Group² reports not experiencing this issue. From the original topic¹ on Google Groups: «After speaking with Google support, it appears that Google has changed the rules on large groups (500-1000 users) to implement a deliberate decision (that has apparently not yet been announced) to not support large groups. The change is to simply block messages based on some unspecified criteria, and the rejection message cites spam but is not actually spam related (and the messages do not appear in a spam folder where we could try to recover them, they are just deleted), and the rejection message suggests making the group moderated (but the group is already moderated). Google support wasn't entirely clear on the details, but said that Google wil...

Another service biting the dust because of GPlus shutdown Desktop Notifications , a browser plugin / Android app for sharing notifications among multiple Android devices and desktop browsers, is also shutting down, in part due to the Google Plus shutdown. The app started as a research project at the Human Computer Interaction group ( http://www.hcilab.org ) at the University of Stuttgart (Germany) , but soon became a project loved and used by many Android users. When asked/suggested in the comments if the termination of the service is due to the research project ending, Dominik Weber , PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Systems group at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and developer of the app, responded: "Pretty much, yes. There's also the fact that Google will shut down Google+, the Google+ API and the legacy Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) API in the coming months. Desktop Notifications was built on top of these services and would pretty much requ...

Google+ Aspire Community going read-only I guess since this was a meta-community about Google+ Collections, rather than an independent topic-specifiic one, it didn't make sense for them to move to another platform. Though it might've been a missed opportunity for dedicated members to provide a community for cross-platform tips on maintaining collections and improving your audience. #MigrationNotice #Signalflare Originally shared by Carolina Liu Closing Aspire Aspire has been a wonderful community to so many of us, but it is now time for Aspire's journey to come to an end. Aspire was developed to expand the Google+ Collections Community, which was dedicated to helping users create high quality collections. We have seen so many important discussions take place in our community, and we have been fortunate to accompany your work and progress over time. You made this community a special place, so thank you all for contributing so much over the years. Aspire will be made inactive...

API/Scraping Question: Any way to retrieve a list of members for a Community? This is mostly for my fellow developers: is there an easy way to get a list of all members of any Community? I know that Community owners can get a list through Google Takeout, but I'm interested in getting such a list for communities of which I'm merely a member, rather than an owner. Preferably through one of the APIs, though scraping would also suffice. One of the reasons for this is that I'd like to be able to have my script generate a list of alternate social media profiles based on the (public) links in users' Google profiles. For instance, specifically for this community it would be interesting to see how many users have set their MeWe/Medium/Blogger/Mastodon/etc urls in their profile yet, and which platforms are the most popular based on that. Based on my own Google+ Circles Takeout JSON files, here's an example list of most listed platforms in the users' profile links section...

Don't be evil? Or don't let people find out you're evil? This article reinforces my feeling that Google+ lost a valuable asset and fighter for its users, when Yonatan Zunger left Google+ as its Chief Architect and later on left Google completely. Originally shared by Cindy Brown Holy moly! Our own Yonatan Zunger has words. I think I'm going to be pulling further back from google products. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/

USB Type C Tester & Reviewer migrating to Medium Benson Leung, known for his extensive tests and reviews of USB Type C products, especially those falsely advertised as Type C on Amazon, is moving his USB Type-C Explained Collection from Google+ ( https://plus.google.com/collection/0Vdov ) to Medium: https://medium.com/@leung.benson Originally shared by Benson Leung Migrating to Medium. I'm in the process of moving my USB Type-C Explained series to Medium. Here's the first one, which is USB Type-C's Configuration Channel I've also taken the opportunity to do a quick once over and correct dead links in the article, and fix up some grammar stuff I missed when I wrote these on G+. https://medium.com/@leung.benson/usb-type-c-s-configuration-channel-31e08047677d https://medium.com/@leung.benson/usb-type-c-s-configuration-channel-31e08047677d

New Notification Icons? Is it me, or has Google+ gotten a set of new notification icons in the https://plus.google.com/notifications/all screen?

Google Takeout isn't that bad... when compared to others Flickr for instance give you no control over what data you specifically want to export. I recently requested an export of all my #Flickr data, due to Flickr's policy change that will take the free 1TB storage away from long-time members who made Flickr into what it was... (Yes, I'm salty) First of all, it took a while before the export was ready. I requested it at Nov 7th, 2018 at 09:44, but it wasn't till Sat, 10 Nov, 14:51 that I got an e-mail saying my export was ready. Secondly, all the download links are on your Flickr profile, but there's no new authentication challenge again before your can download them . As long as you're still logged in, you can download the data. This means if you left your account logged in, they can download your entire data archive without being asked again for a password. A bit of a flaw imho. The 'Account data' seems to include not only your profile information, b...

Some notes regarding filenames in Takeout exports Originally shared by Filip H.F. “FiXato” Slagter Feedback provided regarding Google Takeout archive issues: Because I am still running into some issues with cropped filenames, even when exporting to a zip64 archive, I've filed two tickets through Google Feedback ( https://www.google.com/tools/feedback/reports?hl=en or rather the Send Feedback form on takeout.google.com ). I'm sharing them here to make them public record, so others are aware these issues can occur, and perhaps can also provide feedback to Google in case they're also affected. Regarding Contacts with periods in their name: When a Contact's (first?) name contains (ends with?) a period, the exported VCF tends to lack the .vcf file extension. For instance, I had a contact named: First name: 'wolf.' Last name: 'nanaki' The exported vcf however was named: "Takeout/Contacts/Chat4All/wolf.nanaki", no .vcf file extension at all. This mak...

Augmented/Alternate Reality Game Developer Niantic about Google+ Shutting Down I was reading an article about one of the leading developers in the field of Augmented/Alternate Reality Games, Niantic, known for games such as Ingress , Ingress Prime , Pokémon GO and the upcoming Harry Poter ARG Wizards Unite , about the development process of Ingress Prime, and they had the following to say about Google+ shutting down: A challenge for us was that Ingress was originally launched inside Google around the time that Google+ was launched . We launched the game to Google beta testers, which was a pretty tight group of a few tens of thousands of people who were vetted by Google. We launched on Android only. The Ingress community naturally sprung up, originally, on Google+. It’s persisted there. If you think about Google+ as this shopping mall where everybody’s left, there’s one anchor store in the corner that still has a huge amount of activity. It’s the Ingress store. And now the mall is clos...

Welcome to the new Google+ Wow... this feels... surreal... I must've never visited this Collections page before from this account, I guess? Got this Welcome to the new Google+ right now after logging in again on an old MacBook Pro I hadn't been using for quite some time... Seeing it called 'new Google+' while they recently announced shutting it down... just feels... wrong...

It's a bad sign if the Google employees no longer are using Google's own infrastructure to publish these articles, and instead use competitors such as Medium. Makes you can wonder if Google's Blogger is also slated for termination, like Google+. Originally shared by Android Developers What a new publishing format means for the future of Android Meet the Android App Bundle → goo.gl/aboutappbundles Android’s new publishing format enables smaller installs, simpler releases, dynamic features, and instant discovery. In this detailed post, we’ll show you how it works step by step, and how you can start innovating by adding dynamic features and instant experiences to your app.

Early Writing On The Wall: Google France already shut down activity in August Apparently before the sunset of GPlus was announced, Google France already shut down its presence on the network, and redirected followers to Facebook and even (former) competitor Facebook. https://9to5google.com/2018/08/24/google-france-shuts-down-google-plus-page/