Goodbye Google+ - Hello Blogger

Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash

Well Google meant it when they said they were shutting down Google+ effective today, April 2nd. Over the past week I have been exporting and migrating our community (read the past week's posts to learn more about it and this new blog). However, I was still surprised to click on the Google+ community this morning and simply see our logo and the categories remaining on the site  - Google is quickly emptying the tables, washing the dishes, throwing out the posts, sweeping the floors, and turning out the lights.

If you signed into services with your Google+ account and "plused" things on various social media sites, those pluses are gone and your avatar is now a small gray head. If you owned or moderated any Google+ communities, I hope you took the time to export your data - posts, images, and videos. If not, they are gone with the wind.

But do take a deep breath and relax. We are saying goodbye to Google+, which Google simply starved over the past 18 months. It always had a small following - but it gave us a wonderful opportunity to share posts with images, recordings, and links (and it wasn't Facebook) in a group atmosphere. We enjoyed hangouts and were able to easily link to YouTube videos and our Google sites. However, nothing stays the same - certainly not technology, social media, or apps - things change and things fade away. 

Shutting down Google+ has nothing to do with Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites or any of the other Google services. It simply means that Google's latest (and perhaps last) offering to be a place for social media meetups is no more.

Everything from our LVUG Community was exported and will be here for as long as Blogger is here (please Google don't burn me twice). All 1080 posts were exported; 388 of those posts have been imported, cleaned up, given titles and some additional labels, and published as of today (only 702 to go!). Please feel free to comment here (but be aware that comments are moderated so you won't see them right away). We want to continue to make sure this blog is a place to search the archived posts, share tips and suggestions, and ask questions. I would also encourage you to take advantage of Legacy News and, if you are on Facebook, the Legacy Users Group. There are many ways to stay in the know about your genealogy software of choice AND I encourage you to always maintain your family history data on your computer and only share it online - don't expect someone else to care as much about your data as you do.

Thanks again and goodbye Google+ - it was great while it lasted.