Google Currents for G Suite launching July 6, shutting down Google+ one last time

Abner Li | Jun 4 2020 - 8:09 pm PT

While Google+, the social network, was shut down on April 2, 2019, a G Suite version for enterprise communication still exists. Google Currents was announced as a rebrand just after the consumer deprecation last year and is now set to launch on July 6.

In an email to G Suite administrators today, Google announced that Currents will become generally available on Monday, July 6. Existing Google+ users will be transitioned over to the “updated look and feel” and benefit from “additional features,” including content moderation and administrative privileges.

In beta for the past several months, Google Currents is touted as a place to “Engage employees. Have meaningful discussions. Stay current — together.” This internal community carries over the concept of “tags” and “streams.”

Currents makes it easy to have meaningful discussions by enabling leaders and employees to exchange ideas across the organization and gather valuable feedback and input from others — without flooding inboxes.

The user interface and experience is mostly unchanged with a home stream ordered by relevance (or chronology), while posts from company leadership can be given priority. Text, links, images, and other content from Drive can be shared, along with polls.

Admins can shape the discussion in the organization by creating custom streams to promote specific content to a targeted set of employees or the entire company. Additionally, admins can measure engagement across the platform with metrics to track usage and understand what content is resonating across the organization.

At the launch next month, all Google+ users and content will be automatically transitioned to Currents with full availability taking five days. Existing plus.google.com links will continue to work and redirect to currents.google.com URLs. Meanwhile, an update to Google+ for Android and iOS will introduce the new Currents branding.