From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.

Then there was the changing story of the 2011 bonus. When I hired in, we were all told our 2011 bonus would be tied to the success of Google+. That's a fantastic way to rally your co-workers, except... Once they launched Google+, the Google+ Eliterati (so to speak) changed their minds and announced that any Google+ bonus was for Google+ people alone. Maximum emotionally intelligent genius IMO. Now your own co-workers have been burned. Also not very "googly."

Finally, there was "Real Names." The week of its launch everyone I knew wanted an invite and I used up every single one of them and continued to do so as more were made available to me. Then "Real Names" happened and people stopped asking for invites overnight. That's the moment for me when the tide turned against this thing.

I really liked the initial Google+ UI personally, but the UI ran head-on into the nonsensical "Kennedy" initiative wherein some brilliant designer seemed to decide that since monitors are now twice the size they used to be, they should add twice the whitespace to show the same amount of information as on a much smaller screen. Subversives within the company took to posting nearly blank sheets of printer paper on walls with the single word "Kennedy" in a tiny font you'd only see if you got close to the things. That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how beautiful he thought the Kennedy layout was in our office for all to hear whenever they updated GMail or Search to use it.

Of course, there are other reasons beyond my tiny perspective here, but I did have a front row seat for this and it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

I have to agree that the interface, and the "Real Names" requirements were the two biggest hurdles for me to even to start to like Google+.

I really liked the concept of circles, but whenever I did get around to using the social network, it never felt as social and engaging as Twitter. Even when I did find an intersting discussion, it was hard to keep track of replies. Reddit/HNews/Twitter have a tree-like structure for the comments, but Google+ was mostly flat, and hard to keep track of any debate.

I would lose interest on Google+ as soon as I tried to read a comment thread, and close the application altogether.

But these are symptoms. The Dark Tower was because of Vic, no? Maybe Bradley too, but mostly Vic. Vic was a virus against which Google had no immunity. "Do it my way or your career is over". Well, his direction sucked, and that's what you get when you give full trust and power to the wrong individual.

The engineering headcount was ridiculous for Google+. It was also ridiculous to have OKRs for every team at Google to integrate with Google+. Facebook (or really any company) didn't start with Mark Zuckerberg hiring a 1000 engineers and start cranking. If a VC cut him a check for $500 million after his MVP Facebook would probably be a failure. Instead he built the MVP with a few engineers and increased headcount as he increased the user base and shifted vision. Google had this mistaken notion that they could just throw more engineers at the problem and skip the whole product discovery process.

I work in an IT MSP where we do business with lots of small-medium companies, and i am astounded at how much the leadership sets the culture for the company. A sarcastic and passive aggressive CEO will have a company of rude employees. An outgoing confident type A person will work with friendly extroverts.

Separating a team like this guarantees a different culture than the rest of Google, and imherent resentment between the two.

Over the years this is exactly what I experienced. And even if there are a bunch of employees and middle managers that are pushing for a different culture, for the benefit of the company (this can happen in a fast growing company where things haven't settled down yet), it is an uphill battle for those people, and they will eventually leave.

I've never worked at Google but am friends with many Googlers. Someone I know was one of these awful company man manager who worked there would just keep defending G+ with these awful spoon fed comments. I stopped bothering trying to say anything about it since it became obvious that the group think has set. He's doing great at Google these days from what I can tell from his LinkedIn profile. I guess the culture has really changed if those are the Googlers who get promoted.

I've been trying to figure out how Google transitioned from being viewed as having the moral high ground over most other public companies, tech and otherwise, to the sad state it is in today. Based on everything I've read to this point, my best guess has been dysfunctional management. What you describe sounds like basic blunders rather than any sort of mistake due to complexity or bad luck.

http://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/

Of course having a separate facility doesn't guarantee success, and can certainly cause other problems if poorly managed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

It was redesign of all Google products to get a unified look [1]. The lead designer, Jon Wiley, named it Kennedy as a reference to Larry Page's Moonshot Strategy [2]. [3] compares the redesign mockups (in blue) against how the products looked before.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h...

[2]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/

[3]: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2058367/googleredesign_10...

Thanks for providing a great insight. I kept away from Google+ due to it's initial aggressiveness of opting in and linking it across other services. There was already a growing disillusionment around investing time and effort into various concepts, which ended up getting culled[1]. It was Google Reader, which made me realise not to take any Google service for granted or rely on them long-term and only use them in a disposable format.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

Something about this rings true.

it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

From my POV, the Google+ launch was doomed by the way it was foisted on Google users. Because of that, my feelings of cynicism towards the product started in less than a second.

I hated Google plus for how open they forced everyone on it to be. VS Facebook was private in its beginning.

I hated Google plus because they forced all of their services to begin to rely on it. They forced various logins to use it.

I have stopped using play store comments and YouTube for this very reason.

Had they split Google plus into parts where people adopted it slowly they would have fared better. Parts like friend network-1, forum network-2, news network-3, share page-4, posts page-5, etc.

I still remember when they replaced Facebook and Twitter search results with GOOGLE plus results.

And the bonuses part is why this makes so much sense about why they did it.

After the Arab spring turned into winter, a lot of the air went out of the tech balloon. It never was really the same. Cynicism crept in along with the MBAs and the Generals.

Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.

I love a good skunkworks project. But Google+ needed Google to succeed. Apparently Vic felt otherwise and the rest is history, no?

It can be valuable in an org that has gotten bogged down with process that is often in place for good reason, or that needs to focus on longer-term things.

But when you do carve out that team, extra care needs to be spent figuring out how to integrate their efforts and culture with existing teams they need to interface with at various points. Likewise, it really needs to be positioned as a benefit for everyone.

I was interested in google+, but it wasn't worth the risk. This was also the point where I stopped playing with new Google stuff, and started logging in only for email, and logging out.

Now there is no way for Google to know all this, so I assume I got classified under the 'no big deal' group in your analysis.

If you didn't have contact with either marginalised groups who as a matter of survival didn't use their real name or ancient extremely online people who for the entirety of their internet experience had been known as a handle it wouldn't have crossed your radar.

But it was a huge thing.

Thing is, that small group is your grassroots, influencer base without which you fail to thrive. G+ never got beyond the starter 'tech nerds' blogger type adoption and out into mainstream headspace.

You don't have to bow to that crowd to succeed, but at the very least you have to avoid annoying them away from your offering.

For example I remember how odd the two column layout looked. I'm not sure anyone has studied this, but it seemed obvious to me from the first day it was a huge mistake.

It seems like a small thing but I think there is a reason everyone (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is using a single narrow column to feed content to the scrolling user. My hypothesis is that it takes less cognitive effort to parse.

But surely vicg wouldn't tell a lie?!

Glad to finally know that cancer actually has a name. Kennedy made me stop using Google Reader and the GMail web UI.

That's a really bizarre position to take. Every other thing you mentioned sounds a lot more impactful than that.

IC6 meaning... ?

Google plus interface was modern but clunky at the time. It was a Facebook clone with just a cleaner implementation. The RealName policy wasn't as big of a deal as a loud group make it out to be. The circles, though sounds good on paper, wasn't enough of a differentiator. Maintaining them takes time and is work which only a few do. Finally, internal politics perhaps also stopped the team from iterating fast enough to the feedback.

Basically Facebook got to be Google+ parity faster than other way around.

Same thing with Snapchat. Instagram and WhatsApp replicated more of Snapchat than the other way around. Insta won. WhatsApp won. They are growing even though main FB.com is stagnant.

While I didn't work on the Google plus team (I was on a different team), the biggest reason in my mind why Google+ failed was motivation. Not a single Google executive on the team had a strong reason for why they should build Google+ besides "we can make a better version of Facebook". There was no real use case.

Facebook, at the time, however had engineers and product managers who were intensely driven and hungry; they were in a fight for their existence against some of the biggest companies in the world. If they failed their company would fail, and they were hugely passionate about what they were doing. For Googlers, it was largely a theoretical intellectual experiment. Tons of Googlers on Emerald Sea didn't even use any of the social media tools and they didn't get "social". To them it was some thing you plug on top of an existing product to increase ad revenue.

If you don't have the drive and you don't understand your users, you aren't going to build something people want.

OTOH same can't be said about Snap vs Facebook, Facebook simply copying many of Snapchat's features is working out pretty well for them.

What I found hard to believe was that with all the brightest, smartest, most creative people at Google, yet they couldn't figure out a better use case for the platform during all those years? That should have been easy compared to other much harder problems that Google were able to solve successfully.

Similarly, if we think about it Yelp really has no rights to be in the small business index/listing/reviews space. Google own two biggest weapons in "Search Engine" and "Maps" and they completely dominate these two markets, so why was Yelp allowed to get to where it is today I'll never understand?

I don't know why they still have not done this but if they really want to, Google could easily leverage these two tools plus Google Cloud Platform to turn Google main search page into a Global Store where end users could simply enter a product name into the search box and Google will immediately locate it on Google Maps at various stores near where they are with real time stock availability. Users then can quickly go and pick up the item they want in person at the location they prefer. They don't even have to wait for shipping.

Google could develop an easy and intuitive front-end app for small businesses to list their products and update their stock (or use some kinds of tracking technology like beacon), then tie more advanced machine learning and big data analytics features to their Google Cloud Platform for bigger companies that have the needs for such data.

This helps reducing much friction and shorten the purchase funnel for end users who are searching to buy a specific product. At the moment, users must navigate through a sea of websites of which are mostly irrelevant, even after finding a potential website users again must find their way around the store to see whether it even carries or has the product in stock. Can't find the right product or zero stock availability? Well too bad, start again from scratch!

By reducing these steps, Google can effectively help users save much of their time and quickly locate the product they want right on Google Maps. People do not really care about vendors or companies, they only care about the products as that’s really what they’re looking for. Small businesses will also benefit greatly from features like this one since they won’t have to spend more time and money to locate buyers, now buyers just come to them directly.

Google Search + Maps have just become a global retail store overnight.

I don't mind to wait for shipping. In the next two weeks is ok. I don't even search on Google. I search on Amazon. Btw, what is Yelp?

In the U.S, you kind of know ahead what brands of retail stores you will be able to find a product, as opposed to some other countries where it's a lot more difficult to locate them due to the lack of specialized retail stores.

And then shortly after that, having learned nothing, they started hunting down and banning accounts that appeared to be for businesses, since their "Google+ for business" offering wasn't ready yet. By the time it was, nobody wanted to put their business on Google+ anymore.

Finally, after it was already dead (but they didn't seem to know it), they subverted the rest of their business to try to drive users to it - mandatory Google+ account integration, killing any product that tended to compete with it, etc.

Google+ is the demarcation between the old Google that consistently did amazing things and the new Google that, well, mostly doesn't.

I looked this up years ago and got blog posts explaining it. All I get now is page after page of recipes for homemade pot pies. You'd think after a while some logic would spin up to say "I bet this isn't what they're looking for! Let's try something else." It used to do that.

Google + Evil

By the time it opened up to everyone, nobody cared anymore. I can't believe somebody thought it would be a good idea to restrict access to a product that depends on network effects to succeed.

Fundamental problem: social networks with no-one on them are not fun and not sticky.

Fundamental problem 2: if anyone can read what you're writing, it's not a social network, it's a blog. So you can't just let anyone see what people are writing.

The way FB handled that in the early days was that by default, people in the same university network could see your status etc. I don't remember exactly what they could and couldn't do but the point is that they created a semi-privileged circle of people with some access based on a pre-made group that people would be familiar with - fellow students at the same university.

That gave people a network from day 1 in what felt like a controlled way. Also, as noted, they started with a desirable closed group that people wanted to belong to.

They would later expand to other Ivy league schools — aka networks — one by one, rather than simultaneously, as a way to slow their growth.

I imagine an unintended side effect of this growth strategy was the sense of FOMO that it engendered among university students that had heard about but couldn’t join the exclusive/elusive Facebook, unlike the other social networks like Friendster, Hi5 etc.

For each network on their expansion list, Zuck & team would furiously scrape the student directory to seed the new network with plausible student info.

It wasn't just that. At the beginning, you had to be at an Ivy League. And that was the problem, G+ was invite only among a bunch of nerds, whereas FB was invite only among people who network for a living.

If anything, the real distinction is that a network for college students is appealing to teenagers, who are the perfect audience for social media. A network for adults doesn't draw in this crowd.

Unfortunately this increased the barrier to entry at launch too, which for social networks whose value is tied to users generating media is a cardinal sin.

Compared to that, nobody cared about a Facebook ripoff with a different UI and none of the network effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail

"after considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, a figure that was preposterous compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time.[3]"

"On 1 April 2005, exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB, advertising it as 2GB plus"

The sample of the news from these times:

https://betanews.com/2005/04/01/gmail-storage-to-reach-2gb-a...

FB wasn't restricted within your likely friends group (all students at particular schools were made eligible at the same time).

1. Exponentially more space in a market where single or double digit megabytes was the norm. GMail's original pitch was that you never had to delete an email, and that you could always find them with search.

2. It was one of the first web apps. It was dynamic in a way few sites were then. Asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and Web 2.0 were still new concepts.

A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal.

That might be compelling content, compelling connections, or a mix of the two. A cultivated and exclusive club, as with the Haevard Facebook, or early Usenet, has appeal. It's the opening up to the world which kills that initial growth appeal.

Google+ would have done far better to extend the beta period, possibly by years, and shake out its fundamental architectural flaws.

I disagree and think it's 100% the reason it failed.

> A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal.

But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't. And since a social network is only useful if all your friends are on it, people never got into the habit of using it. Why use a social network without your friends? It's not like GMail where it's still useful even if your friends aren't on it.

I can tell you personally that I was excited to get the invite to Google+, only to lose the excitement when only 3 of my friends were on it. By the time Google+ became available to everyone, it was too late. The excitement was gone.

> A cultivated and exclusive club, as with the Haevard Facebook, or early Usenet, has appeal.

The exclusivity of Harvard Facebook succeeded because social media was still in its infancy at the time. Most people didn't have access to the WWW in their pocket yet. Early Usenet had appeal because the Internet itself was still only being used by techies and college students.

Most people didn't hear about it. You can ask people on the street. They sure know facebook. Excitement is not a good way to motivate people to move platforms, in general (despite the niche cases like Fyre Festival which are relatively small). Maybe they should have gotten some celebrity support? Otherwise the excitement wasn't mainstream. G+ needed mainstream users.

> But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't

That doesnt explain the lack of participation a year later. Nobody wanted G+ because they didn't need it. Even if it gave some benefit (which it couldn't) it didn't join with their existing Social Media data making a higher barrier.

Lots of people did. But then they couldn't get an account. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-05-20%202...

The second spike in the trends graph corresponds with the open access public announcement. Interest spiked, but did not sustain.

It's the lack of sustain that hurt G+ in the end. And much of that was due to a very raw early release -- no search, little content, and very muddled concepts, many never really fixed.

With Google+, invites were more or less random, so in a group of 5 friends maybe 3 got one and 2 didn't. Were the 3 people who got invites supposed to just drop their other 2 friends? Obviously people aren't going to do that.

People do like things that are exclusive, but they want to exclude outsiders, not their friends.

Expanding beyond this, especially to Google's other natural affinity group, advertisers and marketers, did far more harm than good to the service IMO.

The actual invite-only period only lasted a few months -- it was general-access by late September 2011:

https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/tech/web/google-plus-public/i...

Facebook's closed period lasted years.

The other thing I thought maybe killed G+ was the "ghost town" effect. Instead of forcing everyone to share everything publicly, people would just share with their close circles. So to an outside observer, it looked like a ghost town, but to the people using it, it seemed perfect.

In the end, I miss it. The people I interacted with on G+ were great. I met some people on the Internet that are now real-life friends. I could always post a random idea or a project I was working on and get feedback. Now I have nothing. Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are. Facebook seems dead (I never used it). Blogging sites like Medium seem evil. So I just share random things with random friends on Discord. It's sad. G+ could have done so well.

We're being told on https://plus.google.com/ that [Google] are in the process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts and Google+ pages. but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google%2B

You'll need to know, or track down, the user or content page to find it. E.g.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190102053619/https://plus.goog...

Raw archive dumps:

https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googleplus

I might be misremembering, but wasn't the decision to completely kill Google+ made soon after a Google+ bug exposing account data was revealed (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-bug-expos...)? Given how integrated Google+ was with the rest of Google, keeping it alive, even in read-only mode, could be a security risk even for unrelated Google services.

For money? Lots of people.

Does Google have a fascination with only hiring people that want to write dissertations about their project of the month?

Your post begs the question, though, why it had to be served as dynamic content in the first place (if it actually was which I'm not sure it was) when it would've been the obvious thing to use just plain HTML. I'm thinking about authors putting in considerable effort into publishing content on G+ (or other platform for that matter). Why would they use an authoring tool that is exclusive to that platform when we have HTML? Why wouldn't they care about their docs being inaccessible if the platform dies?

Why shouldn't it be served as dynamic content, if that's how the system works? All social networks and even most blogging platforms are built like that. I'm not talking about just the contents of individual posts, I'm also thinking of their ranking, as well as smaller details such as user names hyperlinked from the post body. All the data and metadata is stored across a large number of databases. I don't know of any products similar in scope that consist of pre-rendered HTML. Sure, you can scrape or render the HTML at a point in time, but that opens a new can of worms.

I restarted my Twitter, and just started following people who post things in interested in that are not politics -- for me, that's maker spaces, education, STEM, etc -- and it's night and day. A much smaller group of people who post interesting things, ask questions, interact, and are generally friendly.

There's a lot more to Twitter than that. Just don't follow anyone who posts that junk (even if they're real-life friends/acquaintances) and it's actually a pretty nice place to be. If you post interesting stuff and interact with others, you'll gain some followers and be able to have a real conversation, which you will then want to take elsewhere because of the fucking character limit.

A good example is Syonyk's Project Blog (https://syonyk.blogspot.com/). It's hosted on Blogspot, and despite being relatively recent - started in 2015, long past the peak of blogging - he already has over 2.3 million views (total), just writing interesting detailed logs of his tech and home projects.

This is an interesting point.

At the time G+ came out a lot of people were complaining about how you really didn't have control of your content on FB and G+ really tried to create an ecosystem where you had some control of your own content, which ironically what people wanted, but it never really took off.

I also remember some other social media platforms like Diaspora doing the same thing. Even now, I know of a few platforms that are taking a blockchain (decentralized) approach to social media. I think its still way too early to tell if people will use those in great numbers, but I think its the next natural step.

Maybe G+ was ahead of its time??

This is why I quickly quit using Facebook after only starting recently. Well, this and the way I cannot repeatably re-find a post after seeing it once.

It had some nice ideas, and was in many ways better than Facebook. But it wasn't fun, and it wasn't somewhere that was pleasant to hang out for long.

It also felt like it was solving a problem for Google, but not for its users. I could see how it would be strategic for Google to counter Facebook, and how tying searches into my social graph would result in much better data for advertisers. But I couldn't see how exactly that benefited me.

Also the launch strategy of making it invite-only was daft. I was really excited to get an invite just after launch, until I realised that no-one I knew had an account and there was hardly anyone else to talk to. Never really went back.

I distinctly recall a wave (lasted about... 2 weeks?) of serious internet hype where many contacts on Facebook saying they wanted to get on G+ to try and and get away from FB, yet could not get an account due to this rollout methodology. It's my personal opinion this was the shot they missed - you don't keep away the early adopters who will bring in their non-tech friends over time.

I pretty much stopped using it early on when I realized organizing everyone into the various "circles" was a huge undertaking. At the time you HAD to put people into circles and I had a lot of people from Twitter to import.. so I gave up and just didn't use it.

But I wasn't trying to do force Twitter into circles -- just network with close friends.

Because of this, my Gmail contacts could see the comments I'd made on Youtube videos because it was front and center of their G+ profile page, which I recall popping up when you logged into Gmail. Prior to this, there would have been no organic way for them to discover my comments other than randomly coming across a video I'd watched and commented on.

Now, I don't post anything objectionable on YT comments (it is attached to my primary Gmail after all), but I wanted to keep my YT experience separate from people on my Gmail list. G+ took that away in one fell swoop.

When Facebook was at the height of its coolness (like 2007, 2008), most people didn't even see it as a corporation. It was just its own independent thing. It never would have spread if it were attached at the hip to some corporation that had nothing to do with connecting to friends.

What this bit glosses over is the PR disaster that was Google forcing Google+ down the throats of its unwilling users. For example, for years they required Youtube users to consent to the creation of a Google+ profile in order to comment or message other users. I took that as a personal affront and not only refused to consent but installed an extension written specifically to block Google's constant, full-screen begging that blocked even passive Youtube usage.

When I pulled all my Google data with their personal download tool a few months ago, there was no section for Google+. I consider that a hard-won badge of honor.

Oh god. Thanks to this dreadful decision I went from not giving a crap about G+ to actually despising it and wanting it to fail miserably.

I had a youtube account long before Google took over and now all my activity was being posted on my G+ account feed or something. Now I had to turn that off.

Thanks for letting everybody know that I liked some videos Barney the Dinosaur because I let my sister use my PC, Google.

You're not the only one, and I wonder how much that feeling contributed to the failure of Google+. Because the harder Google tried to shove it down my throat, the more I resented it and swore to myself that I wouldn't touch it.

I didn't understand what it was (a bare bones Facebook clone? ), didn't have friends who used it and I can't remember if I saw no content or just only irrelevant content. I gave it maybe 15 minutes and never came back.

And I actually considered myself an interested user, at the time I used Facebook but hated it and still saw Google as a force for good.

It didn't just die by itself. Google Talk was killed with Google+ too. It was a functional, no-nonsense IM that just worked and worked everywhere. After they engulfed this into Google+, it just became a bloated monstrosity that no one could understand. Remember when it suggested you every Google+ user when you tried to type a friend's name in Hangouts? Yeah... that was pretty fucked up.

I am just amazed that Youtube didn't die with it after it was used as a gateway to Google+.

It's the only Google product that felt fun to use. I haven't bothered with Hangouts, Allo, Duo or any of the stuff that followed it.

My brain read that as "down every Google user's throat", and I got an idea why they decided to name it that.

It was more like Twitter than Facebook. Maybe I'm wrong, but too me they were marketing "Twitter with pictures" as "Facebook", and they fell short.

In fact, that was mentioned:

> Of course, Facebook’s news feed has many of the same design elements that I have described here, including ranking. However, important messages sent directly from one person to another have their own dedicated channel that works more like email, with strictly chronological ordering rather than ranking and with an explicit “mark as read” function. Ranking and algorithms are only used for nonessential postings.

Though I suppose it's ambiguous whether he means someone's Wall/Activity Log or Messenger, I suppose, but I read it as the former.

Other times there's like maybe an inside joke or a picture or an anecdote that you think that their friends would enjoy more than your friends.

It's used way more by younger people, though.

My daughter and her friends all use Instagram and Snapchat, or probably something else now. They have dormant Facebook accounts they made when they were teens / early 20s that they've purged of all meaningful content.

I think I actually did but I found it a bit confusing and assumed I didn't understand.

Actually generally I didn't understand what Google thought the workflow for Google+ was "supposed to be." This actually is something I find hard to understand about a lot of their products. There will be a heartwarming video, or some announcment showing a gee wiz feature ... but I'm not sure how they think I should use their product(s).

I loved the look, but I didn't really get what I was supposed to be doing and how things worked.

It felt to me like an engineers social network where I was supposed to invest time to understand it like any other engineering type tool.... that's not what I want from a product like that.

And then I realized that this was bonkers, and that I never wanted to do it again.

I never saw any value add at all for g+ much less a compelling one. My main point was, circles actually seemed like more work which is kind of the opposite of compelling.

The outcomes of these 2 products tells me so. After all Things like Snapchat and instagram popped up due to compelling features. Newer iPhones are struggling due to uncompelling features and would be my counter counter example.

From Google Search onwards, I find/try the product, I like it, it evolves and improves (I presume after some A/B testing somewhere). e.g. gMail is 'web based email client', but was first I know of to let you tag, import from other accounts - and now has the tabs, unsubscribe buttons etc. When some changes (such as the tabs) first arrive, I feel a bit uncomfortable, but you get used to them.. then appreciate them.. and I build up a buffer of trust for the next change that might come.

G+ didn't spring into existence because of customer demand. It appeared because google decided google needed it. We didn't create accounts because they looked useful, they were created to try to get google's network running quickly. We had features pulled on other google products, to push us towards using the damn thing. e.g. I suspect removing latitude from maps wasn't a decision from the maps team to improve their product.

So, too, the difference between "don't be evil" and "be good."

My beloved Google Reader got killed and the latitude feature in my Google Maps was pulled with an explicit 'if you want this feature use Google+'

When I turned up at Google+ for the first time I was in a foul mood and was just there for my missing features - which were now missing/worse.

The idea of being able to create 'groups' was fine in theory - but bit of a mess in reality. Can't remember the exact details as it's gone - but my impression was being forced to use a poxy UI widget, for something better suited to a spreadsheet. My learning though, was that maybe I didn't 'trust' the separation. On Facebook, LinkedIn, random forum - you don't consider each post and choose the audience.

Point above was exacerbated by the god-awful way information was displayed back to you. Seemed to vary between ghost-town bleakness and semi-random information-vomit, sprayed over your screen.

By most actual metrics, Google+ was a failure. 90% of people went there "accidentally". They were trying to do something useful, travel to somewhere useful on the Internet, and clicking the plus.google.com link was a mistake!

90%!

Realnames Realnames Realnames.

Realnames stopped people joining just at a point where Facebook was being incredibly shitty.

First, it didn't make sense that people would quickly leave an established network (FB) to join a new empty network. At this time, most folks who wanted to join a network had finally joined FB. It took a lot of time and momentum for FB to reach that point. Google+ didn't offer anything fundamentally different from Facebook: it was very similar, just with far fewer people to talk to.

Second, Google+ wasn't cool. Most successful non-niche social networks seem to grow from young people first: young people enjoy having an online space that's separate from older friends/family. Then, as the network becomes more popular, older folks join. This is loosely the trend we've seen with Facebook and Instagram, and to a lesser extent with Snapchat and MySpace. But, to get young people to join, you have to offer something cool and/or unique. Google+ wasn't very cool or unique: it seemed to target everyone at all once.

G+ failed for other reasons too of course, which others have listed in the comments here. But I think the biggest reason it failed was because there wasn't any compelling reason to use the network.

(I'm a Googler, but my opinions are my own)

And a big reason not to switch: the big feature that Facebook has which Google could not possibly replicate is that it's not the same company that has control over all the data I type into the web search box. It's bad enough how much data my web search of choice gets, it's bad enough how much data my social media network of choice gets, but combined it would be worse than the sum of its parts.

It's incredibly easy to be data-conscious when all you have to to is not take active action to migrate from Facebook to Google and I believe that many people who would never lift a finger to control their data are still more than willing to factor data into their decisions if it's not inconveniencing them. Similar problems are faced by Bing and Alexa, why would I want to invite Microsoft or Amazon even deeper into my life than they already are?

I've seen this in mobile games over and over again - people who were successful in AAA games would start a company and raise a bunch of money and say "We're going to FIX mobile gaming!" And then they would fail spectacularly because their mental model of the problem didn't accurately reflect reality.

Google has repeatedly blown chances to build social platforms because they seem to believe that every problem can be solved via scale. OpenSocial is another prime example: They built a platform, brought in social networks, were able to say that they had X many millions of users and thus had achieved massive success... but it was a terrible API that was difficult to work with and offered far less functionality than the Facebook platform it was meant to compete with. I'd love to see some commentary from someone who worked on that, but my impression was that they didn't understand that the FB platform's extreme ease of use and developer-friendliness was what made it work well, and that the platform's scale was a value-add on top of that.

Like what? I'm in my 20s-- I haven't used Facebook in 10 years and I have never once had the feeling from my interactions with other people that I had missed out on something.

But the older you get, the fewer people you tend to have around. My social life is easily 30 times harder to maintain now than it was when I was in college. Work was also an easy place to find friends and kindred spirits. At first. But now, more and more, my coworkers are younger than me and even if we enjoy each other’s company there is simply less and less we have in common.

Family starts dying off, or gradually moves over time to where everyone is scattered across the globe. Same with friends. Or they get married, have kids, get busy with careers, etc.

New friends and family enter ones life of course, but they come fewer and farther between, and never feel quite as deep as those early life relationships.

Many other platforms offer a way to stay connected, of course. But many of them are either too superficial to feel worthwhile, or have too few people on them, or have too much friction to be consistently used.

I agree most of what is on Facebook is rather irrelevant, and I basically ignore 99% of what people post. But for those of us whose social lives have been scattered to the wind, nothing else out there comes close to Facebook’s utility.

While "buy out your competitors" is not exactly a supergenius-level strategy, it is amazing how well it's worked out for FB.

I am fully aware it's a part of the Facebook ecosystem.

It's identical to a facebook feed....except it's a tiny one with only the people YOU chose to include, and doesn't get polluted with any external content.

I am fully aware it's a part of the Facebook ecosystem.

He then let me know that another high school friend of mine had just moved a few miles away from me (I live thousands of miles away from where I went to high school, so this was news to me.) I went to her housewarming party--invited through Facebook--and now she and I have reconnected too.

I am in several Facebook groups for our industry (cell phone repair) and it's how I've made friends, learned about new developments in our industry, and found vendors who are awesome.

I am by no means a huge Facebook fan; the article yesterday about how they treat their outsourced content moderation teams was appalling. However, I acknowledge its utility for both business and personal uses.

So yeah, Facebook is a good place for me to keep up with people.

All that added up to me begrudgingly returning to facebook.

But to be honest, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.

What, you say? They don't have to use Facebook to do that? Of course they don't. But they do, and I can't fix that. Your cohort seemingly doesn't, or the members that do aren't members you care about.

That's what network effects are all about. "Facebook" isn't a product or a feature list in this context, it's a community. They have it, Google didn't, and that's what the linked article is about.

The key reason is because Google didn't do any 'human' testing before release.

They should have picked a school or town or even a small country and released it just for those people.

If it didn't work there (IE. See sustained growth till it had most of the market share), they should have changed the product, tested in a new town, etc.

As OP points out, without data, you can't make good decisions, and most decisions in a social product can't be retroactively changed. Even Facebook did staged school-by-school rollouts to refine their model before going fully public. Doing anything else is doomed to fail.

1) Invite Only It makes sense for gmail to be invite only, as you can still connect to non gmail users. Its email. It doesn't make sense to make Google Plus invite only. You are just limiting the growth of your product. It was dumb.

2) Circles Circles were good and bad. Circle are groups. Groups are what everyone now uses on WhatsApp, but WhatsApp is optimized for PRIVATE communication, while Google Plus was a SOCIAL network. So, when I made awesome posts and shared with my circles, those who were not in circles, saw my boring empty profile and moved on. What is there were others interested in my Lego and Arduino cirles? They wouldn't be able to know about my lego and arduino posts, and they wouldn't be able to get themselves added to my lego and arduino circles (they tried to rectify this later on by some other feature, but it was too late by then).

3) Real Name Why try to go this route? I just didn't understand. Maybe requirements from higher-higher up?

4) Slow UI While the UI looked good, I am not sure how good of an experience was it. It was definetly SLOW.

All they had to do was to make a facebook clone. Then slowly polish it.

No other sites have a larger penetration of "socially validated" / "web of trust" connected with real names, pictures, and some kinds of "social/semi-public" activity.

Twitter, Yahoo, etc. have tons of "CoolPerson5583" but correspondingly fewer "true identities" with mutual friends, interaction between members, etc (counter-examples welcome!).

This correspondingly increases the value of "true identity" accounts. 100 twitter accounts could be 100 robots all following each other. 100 facebook accounts tied to pretty much any "real-ish" person pretty regularly will get you ~100 real people on the back-end.

I'm aware of certain people who may have 2-3 semi-active "alternate" facebook accounts (ie: friends-only v. semi-professional, friends-only v. business-related, friends-only v. alternate-group/identity), but facebook accounts are "more important" than twitter accounts because of the _value_ of the social proof/social connections between "real people" vs. "anonymous speech" or "anonymous acquaintances".

A facebook account with very few people in your social circle "vouching for it" would rightfully be greeted with suspicion. A facebook account is very difficult to "take over", as with a sufficient number of connections, your identity in facebook is directly related to who you're connected to in your social network. (these statement also apply to LinkedIn).

You simply _cannot_ create/recreate a new facebook or linkedin account in the same way you can create a new twitter account or spotify account. People _KNOW_ you on linkedin/facebook, and even if you "rotate" your account, you'd just end up in the same "slot" in the social network.

However on twitter, if I were to make "userfoo123" and "userbar456", those two users could have wildly different personalities/actions/social-circles, etc much more easily than having two accounts on facebook or to accounts on linkedin.

GMail/email accounts are sometimes another proxy for "real identity" b/c they are often associated with a particular individual, contain materially sensitive information, and are kindof rough to re-create in case you wanted to change your identity (logins/password resets, etc.).

However, gmail/email accounts are much more prone to personal identity management and not _social_ identity management (ie: you log into your bank account w/ your gmail address, but you don't usually directly post cat-memes with your gmail address).

Identity management is a tricky thing. They didn't want to be what twitter turned in to... they wanted to be "the white pages / phone book" and steal that job from Facebook/LinkedIn.

This isn't so much Google+'s failure as a product as it was the astounding success of FB at keeping it's users. Google+ definitely had some cool and interesting features, but people just didn't care. I think a great case study would be to see why MySpace failed to keep it's users and FB got them, and why Google+ couldn't achieve the same critical mass.

I think the eventual fracturing of the features of Google+ and migration into other products was a smart move.

Here's an example conversation I had at the time with someone about why we should switch over to Google+:

Me: It's better! Cool features

Friend: Ya but w/e FB already has everyone there...plus those features are meh

Me: Ya but privacy!

Friend: Let's be real, Google and FB make money the same way...ain't no one's privacy gonna get in the way of that

Me: True...

There was zero sense of privacy and they tried to shove that down my throat, and I vomited it out of my system.

I wrote about this a while ago and submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515513

The problem was it relied on people self-categorizing their own content.

So just some person in the reddit web design circle thinks sharing their dogs or kids photos is fine and at that point G+ was worthless to me. IT's just subreddits without the moderation.

Leading to the inevitable "you're holding it wrong" accusations agaist the poster that they weren't posting correctly.

Collections, a late feature addition, helped this markedly.

The whole "influencer" phenomenon (originating in the Chinese KOL - Key Opinion Leaders - phenomenon) is specifically engineered to be a unidirectional mechanism.

In fact, Snapchat tried to do the same with "Discover", which ended up in Google Plus territory. It was not very usable.

The fundamental failure is by computer science or the IETF that there is no open standard for federated social networking. Some might say social networking is out of scope for academic research. But why was SMTP not out of scope when it was invented?

There is ActivityPub (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub) but it's unlikely that any of the big parties is going to adopt it.

And you wouldn't even say that at this point, with the open-access movement and academics trying to think of alternative ways to do peer review and curation openly.

You have to pay to read Medium now?

It seems like a better model should somehow encourage people to think about their audience and post what they would appreciate.

At the same time, most of them aren't gamers, so gaming content is on a different channel. I don't even regularly use discord for their VOIP chat (arguably the reason they caught on), but unfortunately it is just easier to use for non-technical people than IRC.

Similarly these kind-of-friends can follow me because they find me interesting and I'll feel no pressure to follow them back. Half of the time I get a friend request in Facebook, I don't really know the person (but I have reasons to expect that the person thinks they "know" me) so it feels awkward either to accept or decline.

Just my two cents.

Facebook used its invite-only (campus-only, .edu only) natural to build status.

However, a college campus is a dense subgraph of the overall human social network. People in college are socially interacting with mostly other people in their college.

Google+ was invite only, but the invites were not clustered in the network. The subgraph induced by the invites were a fairly random slice through the overall human social network. Not actually random, there were dense subgraphs of Google employees, and of certain tech communities in there. And indeed, within these subgraphs G+ got some traction.

But most early users joined and found none of the people they wanted to communicate with could get on. I viscerally remember being in this position as a user. You sent invites to your friends, and you waited. In the meantime, you went back to Facebook.

This makes almost everyones' first use experience suck. A B2C product where everyones first use experience sucks is dead on arrival.

I remember discussing this at the time. It seemed like madness to me. (I was doing a PhD studying social graphs.)

My first tweet on twitter, from 2010, is about Google Buzz (a preceding social product): https://twitter.com/fergal_reid/status/8974231887 "No beta to build up hype for Buzz. They realised that social apps that need a critical mass of users have to happen all at once."

When it turned out they had not in fact realized this for Google+ I was dumbfounded. I still believe this one decision likely cost Google tens of billions of dollars. Many many users would have preferred G+ to work - I'm reminded of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/918/

I would love to hear the inside story here and learn how this was actually weighed up, or that I was wrong.

1. The real name policy was draconian. Leadership didn’t listen to internal or external outcries for far too long.

2. The team leaned into “circles” and a strange permission model even over usability. E.g. rather than posting to someone’s wall, you posted to your own and set the viewing permission to that person.

3. Circles were frankly a chore to manage.

4. The network was seeded with too homogenous a network. Google employees were given first access and then could invite two people. The result was a network that was too highly concentrated with tech bros at official launch.

However, it didn't do what Google wanted. It didn't capture my attention for hours and get me to engage with all kinds of corporate marketing and ads. It didn't teach Google anything about me (to be used to sell me stuff later) that it didn't already know.

We know with social media, we are the product, not the customer. So Google+ didn't fail, we failed. I was a great customer of G+, but I guess I wasn't a very good product.