Google launched the social network Google+ in 2011.
Google+ began on June 28, 2011, as an invitation-only service before becoming broadly available later that year. Its features included Circles for organizing contacts, Hangouts for video conversations and a personalized stream of posts. The design attempted to connect social sharing with Google’s existing services.
Google+ was not Google’s first social product: Orkut and Google Buzz came earlier. Google announced that the consumer version of Google+ would shut down in 2018 after a security issue and low usage, while Google+ for organizations continued in a different form before being replaced by Currents.