The Internet Archive will save Google+

Google Plus will continue to live on the Internet Archive: it will be possible to see comments and images posted by users

There are really only a few days left until the final end of the last in a long line of failed Google experiments: April 2 will close forever Google +, the social network of Mountain View that, thanks to a not very intuitive system of "circles", wanted to compete with Facebook by focusing on privacy but that, ironically, also because of privacy issues will be closed even earlier than expected.

In a couple of weeks, therefore, millions of posts published by G+ users will disappear from the Internet during the short life (June 2011-April 2019) of this social network that will go, deservedly or not, into oblivion. But all is not lost, as the saying goes: some public posts will be saved in the Internet Archive, the great archive of the Web that keeps track of the content published over time by users and companies. To save the public posts of Google+ users will be the "Archive Team", i.e. a "disconnected collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and boasters who are dedicated to saving our digital heritage" and that is not directly linked to Internet Archive.

How Google Plus posts will be saved on Internet Archive

As G+ has been a social network, albeit sui generis, many wonder if the Archive Team guys will take care of respecting the privacy of former users. The answer, they say, is yes: only public posts and public comments will be archived and, moreover, with all the limits of Internet Archive archiving. Which is a database containing a "low-resolution version" of Web history. Images and videos published, for example, will be archived at minimum quality to save space while texts will be saved until a possible "Continue reading".

Only part of the information published on Google Plus will be saved in the archive and most of the content will be trashed forever. Former users who will need to save a full copy of their publications have Google's official procedure at their disposal. Google+ company accounts, those opened within the Google GSuite, will continue to exist, albeit with limitations. In any case, we are now at the end of the story of a social network that never really took off, and which has met the exact same end as Google's other (failed) experiments in the social field: Orkut (January 2004-September 2014), Waze (a social network for exchanging road information bought by Google in June 2013 and now transformed into a maps and alerts app) and Google Buzz (February 2010-October 2011).