Google Plus to be replaced with Currents over the next five days

Social network Google Plus, owned and operated by Google has officially been replaced by Google Currents for its G Suite customers in a gradual roll-out said to be completed within five days. This comes after Google’s announcement in 2018 which mentioned Google’s decision to shut down Google Plus for its consumers in April 2019 due to “low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that met consumers’ expectations”, according to a Google post.

Currents is a G Suite application that is said to “enable people to have meaningful discussions and interactions across their organisation”, helping keep everyone in the know and giving leaders the opportunity to connect with their employees, as stated on Google’s official blogpost.

The company further mentioned that Currents comes with a new look, feel and set of features, which include custom streams and tags, as well as an option to allow “super admins” to enable content moderation and administrative privileges for specific users in their organisation. Launched as a beta version shortly after Google Plus was shut down in April 2019, Currents will now automatically transfer all of G Suite companies’ content from Google Plus and replace Android and iOS apps as a mandatory update for all its users.

This is not the first time Google has utilised the name Currents as part of its brand. The name “Currents” was recycled from its past magazine app that displayed full-length content from over 150 partner publishers like Fast Company, Forbes and The Daily Beast. Its flip-board style pulled news from various sources to display them in a magazine format, optimised for smartphones and tablets. However, it was quickly replaced by the Google Play Newsstand app in 2013, and subsequently replaced by Google News.

Google has been releasing an array of features recently. In June this year, Google added a fact check information feature to its images globally to help users make more informed judgements about what they saw on the web. The latest feature built on the fact check results in Search and News first launched in 2017. Meanwhile in May 2020, it placed a block on ads that drained battery and data by limiting the resources a display ad could use before the user interacted with the ad.

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