Google has announced that they will be shutting down their Google Plus service in April 2019. This will directly affect a family and friends community that I created as a means of privately sharing photos, birthday greetings and news with family and close friends.

After I received the shutdown news, I did some research for alternative social networking sites. MeWe touted itself as the Next-Gen Social Network, a somewhat pretentious claim, but it does meet my needs as a platform for a private community group.

I’ve been using MeWe for about a month and have convinced some of my family and friends to give it try. A friends and family group is useless without members. I created this post to give an overview of the desktop user interface. The mobile application has a string of icons along the bottom which correspond to the menu items. The one exception is the term communities is used instead of groups on the mobile application.

Profile Page

The profile page can be accessed by clicking the circular icon in the upper right corner. It defaults to a taco, sick looking earth or a slice of bread. The profile page contains all the information you are willing to share. It is important to fill it out if you expect to make contact with anyone.

Home Page

The home page contains a chat column on left, the users current posting in the center and a status column on the right. Users have the ability to share minutiae such as the food they are eating or what they are drinking. There is no icon for a toilet.

Group Page

The group page (communities on mobile) has a listing of groups that the user has joined. The center column contains a featured post followed by member postings. The right column lists #Tags added to the posts. Clicking on a hashtag such as #daily_photo will display just the posts with that hashtag. Users can create their own hashtags. Members is another useful tab in this column. It allows the user to view only posts created by the user.

Pages Page

MeWe has Freemium business model. They do not carry advertising but hope that folks will pay for features such as having a business page.

Events Page

The event page has a calendar of public and private events.

Conclusion

I think MeWe is a good replacement for Google+. It will never be a Facebook and that is a good thing. I had a few bots try to join my groups, but stymied them by asking a few questions. If you are a member or sign up, look for my profile.