On Social Media

Final, final, Takeout I've just run the big posts takeout and it completed in a normal and acceptable time of 5 minutes or so. So it feels like it should be possible and no problem to do one last final takeout on Monday 1-April. My image problems are still there but they are confined to only a few posts. It's obviously not going to get fixed now. I doesn't look like we'll get a usable Communities download either that includes comments.

Enhanced G+Communities Takeout is available Hooray! The enhanced G+Communities Takeout is available with full content of Public communities available to Owners and Moderators. The Posts section is generating a single file for each post just as with g+Stream.posts and in the same format. Posts.JSON is correctly producing a JSON file for each post. The one oddity is that Community.Summary is always in HTML even if you specify JSON. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/plus_communities Thank you Google, for delivering on the promise under the wire. It's still just early March! If anyone successfully uses this for a big community, please report back.

What will you do with links to G+Photo Albums? Perhaps you run a blog or forum that contains posts that have links to G+Photo albums that you create back in the heady days of Picasa. When publishing public photo albums was really easy. It's 11-Mar and there's 22 days till G+Sunset. On 2-April all those photos will be gone and all those links will fail. You can download the "G+Photos from posts" albums, upload them to Google Photos or some other shared space. And then go through your blog adjusting all the links. Or you can just let them 404. https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/07/less-than-a-month-to-go-before-google-breaks-hundreds-of-thousands-of-links-all-over-the-internet/

Contacts, Circles and AboutMe https://contacts.google.com/ The Classic web Google Contacts UI was retired on 12-Feb. The new interface no longer displays Circles. But it does display data from AboutMe if the contact info has a link to the G+Profile URL. Along with this, VCF import of Takeout.Circles data has improved so the few fields in that all go to sensible places and the profile URL is added. It appears that this includes sections where the privacy has been set to public such as Emails, phone numbers, the list of links and such like. Unfortunately, Android Contacts doesn't seem to display the linked data from Aboutme. This seems to be only for the web interface. Some Implications. 1) Make it easy for people to find you. Fill in your AboutMe data . https://aboutme.google.com/ Especially and including the links to your profiles on other systems. 2) Public data. Make each section as public as you feel comfortable with. If you want other people to find you and the data, then ...

Just came across this. https://topcontributor.withgoogle.com/profiles I had no idea it existed. So that's where they all are. https://topcontributor.withgoogle.com/profiles

FUQ Google+ Sunset With 49 days till G+ Sunset and 23 days till the G+API Sunset, I wonder if it's time for a "FUQ Google+ Sunset" file. As in Frequently Unanswered Questions for Google relating to the G+ sunset. - When will Takeout for G+ stop working? - Will there be a public profile display of AboutMe information? - How will the AboutMe privacy controls work after G+ Circles disappear? - Will any more fields disappear from AboutMe? - Will the numeric Profile URLs be redirected to something useful? - What will happen to the Circles display in Google Contacts? - Is there any point or need to import Takeout.G+Circles into Google Contacts? - Should I download Takeout.Profile? - Where is the documentation of the schema used in the JSON versions of Takeout for G+ ? - When in March will Public Community, Owners and Moderators, start getting full content in their Community Takeout? - What's the simplest possible way and Google recommended procedure to get photos out of ...

Preserving Circle contacts and your G+ social graph Signal Boost. Some of the mods at G+Help are looking for detail about people trying to preserve their circles, maintain contacts and use profiles after the shutdown. If these areas are important to you, please dive in. Rupert Wood says: Do you know of people or posts directly addressing this particular issue: Preserving G+ relationships and circles contacts and disappointed in what the 'Circles' download provides. I'm trying to collect some specific and detailed feedback posted by users regarding this in the last couple of months This is the main currently active post. https://plus.google.com/+JulianBond23/posts/dxUzVbfA8dC What happens to the current Circle profile data in Google Contacts? Should I import my Takeout of Circles to Contacts? How much and how little information should there be in Takeout.Circles? What other Google products use the Profile About data and do you currently use that link? What happens to AboutM...

On preserving your photos. https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/flickrs-mass-deletion-is-a-reminder-not-to-trust-cloud-storage.html You Should Never Have Trusted Flickr to Protect Your Cherished Photos. And you shouldn't trust Facebook, Apple, Google, Instagram, Pinterest, tumblr, etc, etc, either. So where should you put your photos so they're shareable on the web indefinitely or at least under your control instead some faceless FAANG? https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/flickrs-mass-deletion-is-a-reminder-not-to-trust-cloud-storage.html

Takeout Stalled Can anyone do a takeout right now? I'm trying to get g+stream.activitylog to check something about blogger comments and it won't budge. Either its overloaded, or I keep adding comments and that's confusing it. Previously and before late yesterday's mass influx it only took a couple of minutes. The mass email has completely overloaded the G+Help community. I wonder if it's also completely overloaded the Takeout system.

This is kind of important and needs sharing widely. Where will the profiles go? Originally shared by Julian Bond About Me and Profile Data There doesn't seem to be any information in the Google Plus close down announcements and FAQs about what happens to the data in https://aboutme.google.com/ and our public profile and avatar. There is mention in the GSuite documents that Vanity URLs will stop working but it suggests that the numeric ID URLs will still be available. However that might only be for GSuite customers and not for consumer Google Plus users. The Takeout files are littered with a mix of vanity and numeric URL links along with the avatar images. The circle takeout files especially contain no contact information except the profile URL. Even if the other user has made their email address pubic it's not in the takeout file. So the only way of contacting the person or importing actual data into Contacts is to view their profile. A critical part of this is the Sites secti...

29-Jan-2019. G+ Notifications are broken. The account button top right is behaving strangely with no mention of the G+ Profile any more. Previously the API announcement said, On March 7, 2019, all Google+ APIs will be shut down. This will be a progressive shutdown beginning in late January, with calls to these APIs starting to intermittently fail as early as January 28, 2019 Coincidence?

Google + Photos from posts Photos Support Forum thread https://support.google.com/photos/thread/1026918 G+Help thread https://plus.google.com/+JulianBond23/posts/8wG9XoWWFGv A Google Photos Product expert has found text on the intermediate dialogs you get when you delete a Google Plus profile. Photos and videos from your posts will continue to appear in your album archive, but will be deleted from your album archive as part of the Google+ consumer shutdown. Photos and videos in comments, and cover photos for collections, will be deleted. This strongly suggests what you would expect. Which is that the album and it's contents called "G+ Photos From Posts" in the album archive will be deleted at the G+Sunset. This is the first official comment we've found about what happens to images uploaded while creating a post or comment in G+ but not first uploaded to Photos. They're going to be deleted and disappear for ever. It makes it really important that G+ users know this...

Blogger.com - self-help communities Does anyone know of an active self-help community for Blogger.com? On G+ or elsewhere. The only moderately active forum is the official Google Productforum. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/blogger There's quite a lot of integration between Blogger.com and G+ but I've been unable to find any information about what's going to happen with all this. In theory a lot of it is related to the G+ API which of course will close 7-Mar-2019. So large parts of that integration will fail then, with the rest failing in April 2019. - Accounts - Profiles - G+ Comments - Widgets - G+ Share buttons As far as I can tell there's been zero official announcements about the G+ Sunset aimed at Blogger.com users. Like G+ images, Blogger images are also in an uncertain limbo. Almost in Google Photos, but not quite.

Official Updates from Google about G+ There haven't been any more as of 8-Jan-2019. It's 3 months today since the initial announcement from Google on 8-Oct-2018. It's just under one month since the expediting announcement from Google on 10-Dec-2018 that chopped 4 months off the sunset date. It's 2 months until the G+ API closes on 7-Mar-2019. It's 3 months (ish) until Google Plus closes in April 2019. We still don't know the exact date. We still don't know the actual mechanics of what happens on the date G+ closes. Will it go read only for a while? Will all G+ URLs return 404? Will Takeout remain available for a while? As far as I can tell there's been no announcement about what's going to happen to G+ integration into Blogger. That's profiles, comments, widgets, share buttons and so on. There's nothing on the official Blogger blog and nothing in the Blogger product forums. There's been no announcements about bugs, fixes or changes to T...

Is there any automated way of finding your G+ Friends (that you've circled in G+) on other platforms and following them there? There's a similar question for each of Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Diaspora, MeWe and so on. There is a Mastodon-Twitter bridge for doing this, but it seems to be broken currently. In theory this lets you find your Twitter friends on Mastodon. As far as I can guess it's using people using it to build a searchable database of links. Somebody said: "One problem, among others, is they use different names..." And I replied: If only there was a unique identifier that most people used. Like email, say, ;) Or mboxsha1sum. Or PGP. Except Google Takeout, G+circles doesn't appear to contain email addresses even if the other profile has them set to public. And few systems these days seem to use contact emails as a way of finding your existing friends. Or if only there was an open standard for importing and exporting your social graph. Like FOAF ...

JPGs in Takeout.G+Stream.Posts.JSON I've just gone down a rabbit hole and now I'm confused. I was puzzled about the location of images that are currently stored in https://$XX.googleusercontent.com/ and are then referenced in the JSON. But then I noticed that my takeout download has 1000 or so img9999.jpg files that are from somebody else. I do kind of recognise them and I think what might have happened is that somebody commented on one of my posts with a link to a large Google Photos Album. But why should these end up in MY takeout file? There's also a large number of images that do belong to me, but they're stored in Google Photos. And I just made a link to them in various G+ posts. They weren't uploaded to G+ specifically. So why are they in the G+Posts Takeout archive? None of these photos are visible to me in https://get.google.com/albumarchive/ or in my Photos store, or in my local synced directory. I wonder if this is part of the source of the HUGE takeout ...

A reminder. The Google Plus API will close down on or before 10-Mar-2019. That's 90 days from this announcement. https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expediting-changes-google-plus/ While it's still available, the API is here. https://developers.google.com/+/ It has 2 halves. - Web. This is all the visible buttons, badges, referred signin, embedded posts, comments in blogger, etc, etc. - REST. This is the programmers API. The People section of the REST G+API is already deprecated. It is replaced by the Google People API. This also replaces the Contacts API. It is expected that this will continue. https://developers.google.com/people/

Anyone who has been looking at using the G+API.People.get functions, have you also looked at https://developers.google.com/people/api/rest/v1/people ? This is the non-Google-Plus API for accessing Google accounts. It retrieves all the same data from the aboutme page. It references the same account IDs. It refers to Google profiles as:- Google profile. You can view the profile at https://profiles.google.com/id where id is the source id. Google contact. You can view the contact at https://contact.google.com/id where id is the source id. Where id is the same old account id number. So hang on a minute, what's going on here? I haven't dug into this fully but it appears that authentication and access is via a more restrictive process than the G+API version. But the data is exactly the same. Failures in the G+API privacy controls were given as the reason for killing G+ but here we have what appears to be a more or less identical API to the same data. It's not definitive but it ...

The mods on Google+Help are consistently stating that Google can't export content from communities that was written by somebody else, even if you are the owner of the community. And that Google can't do this for reasons of privacy, GDPR, etc, etc. That you would need explicit permission of everyone in the community who has ever posted to save their content. And that this is why Takeout.G+communities only gives you a list of URLs for the posts. This is beginning to really annoy me and so I I find myself compelled to argue back. Here's what I wrote last time this came up in https://plus.google.com/u/0/102282558639672545743/posts/icWeMWvj8hr Technically, the G+ API let's you get access to any post and it's comments that you can view from code. That's the technique used in the open source tool linked above. You do have to jump through hoops to get a list of the posts in a community in a form that's useable by the API. So Google does provide tools to save the con...

There's recently been a question about moving G+ Photos to Google Photos. [That is, Photos posted to Google+] Just been playing with this. Here's one route. 1. Go to Google Photos settings and set Google Drive - Sync photos & videos from Google Drive. 2. Google Takeout. G+Streams.Photos. 3. Unzip locally. 4. Copy the contents of 'Takeout\Google+ Stream\Photos\Photos from posts' to a directory in Google Drive\My Pictures 5. Fire up "Backup and Sync from Google" to upload 6. Check the photos are now present in Photos. It obviously helps to have fast up and download from your internet provider. And it is a bit cumbersome to have to download, unzip and then upload the photos. There may be some shortcuts in there. I haven't tried saving the Takeout direct to Drive. It's possible that is all that's needed if you've previously set Photos to sync from Drive. This stuff is so confused and confusing. It's extrordinary how much cruft Google ha...