IMHO if Google had just kept G+ on its own (working hard on fixing the "ghost town" byproduct of evolved privacy features, and providing decent APIs), adoption numbers could have been lower in the short term, but the product would have survived in the long run. Integration with other Google products should have come naturally, not forcefully. Then we would have got a modern social network people actually wanted to join, instead of a tainted product stinking of corporate malfeasance.

I am sure the social media trend numbers looked great on paper, but they severely underestimated how tired people would get with it. (I'd say only a small fraction of my facebook friends still are active there, for instance.)

Anyhow, my troubles with the G+ branding may sound like a nitpick, but I think it was a lot of the problem. People already had privacy concerns about Google, now they could have privacy concerns+.

G+ positioned itself against Facebook sort of like DuckDuckGo went against Google: we made the same product, but fixed X!!!, where X is some gripe about the incumbent's product that only a small percentage of the product's potential userbase cares about (privacy, in both of these cases).

That was (and is!) a fantastic strategy for DDG, for whom a fraction of a percent of all search traffic counts as massive, life-changing success. Google is not DDG, though. G+ would have needed a much larger share of the social networking market to be considered a win for Google, and the initial differentiation was not anywhere near clear enough to get there against a rival as strong as Facebook.

I also agree about the UI mess, and all that, of course, it was not a great product to use out of the gate.

The "social must be everything" Mantra that Google was chanting then was annoying and ridiculous. But part of the situation was the company didn't want to just create a useful service for people but rather wanted to impose a situation where people's identities could be monetized by Google.

Facebook has had trouble monetizing their product and I suspect they're safe because every company with the resources to produce a UI and service as useful as Facebook is going to want have such a service impose more conditions, be oriented towards quicker monetization, etc.

Even MySpace could have persisted if they'd focused on providing things Facebook didn't - but no one wanted to extend credit to them to do and creating this stuff apparently costs a lot of money for a significant amount of time.

Google did an excellent job of targeting influencers and creating a wonderful experience for a few million people in the first several weeks of the "closed" beta. While most of the advantages were indeed small, there was one very big carrot: the possibility of improving your SEO via G+. [Of course a lot of people don't care about this, but they influencers they were talking about disproportionately do.] Facebook got caught somewhat flat-footed; Zuck threw everybody into lockdown mode for a few months, and when they surfaced, the general reaction "this is the best you can do?"

So while I agree that the technical issues weren't a major reason (Hangouts might have been janky but Facebook didn't have anything remotely comparable), I really do think it was the social stuff that killed them.

- the nymwars turned off a lot of their most enthusiastic early supporters, and turned the overall energy negative at a crucial time

- the failure to create a developer ecosystem (due to the lack of a write API) left them unable to leverage their deep pockets for a longer-term war of attrition against Facebook

At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it.

Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal.

Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders.

Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email.

Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future.

Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.

I think it basically was the social reasons. The name is really clunky and corporate. It was never that cool or exciting to people. The lack of original inspiration and the obvious ham-handed attempt to move people from Facebook just made it fall flat.

Sergei and Larry (possibly mistakenly) felt like they wanted to rebrand Google as a "social network that manages all information you could ever want," as opposed to a "web search engine that also provides email, messaging, picture sharing, and a bunch of other random stuff." If you look at it that way, rather than forcing everyone into a social network, they were trying to pull everything else they offered underneath their G+ umbrella -- Imagine if FB started out as say, just messaging. Then offered "friending," basically to the extent of LinkedIn - see job info, school, etc. Then offered photo albums. And then one day said "oh all this goes into your facebook profile, we're a social network now." The end product would be the same as what we have today.

Would we would probably all be shoveling the shit onto them too? Probably. But that doesn't inherently make "facebook" a terrible product, or the idea of tying all those services into a single social network "insane," I don't think.

I think from a meeting-room/white-boarding level, what google was trying makes a LOT of sense. It makes Google's offerings more cohesive. That it doesn't happen to be the way YOU as a customer sees or wants to see Google was not considered (and that's their failure). They seemed to just be running on the vision of what the end product would look like, which would be a competitor for Facebook, but with VERY different, several unrivaled sub-offerings. Turns out they forgot that how they get there matters a lot too.

I also think they were on the pathway to innovating further, starting with Hangouts...no other social network where nearly all your friends were gave you multi-way voice+video chat, sharing the same YT video, etc. I think they could have done more, but G+ just sucked so much that it could probably never get any of its labs features off the ground.

I hate G+ as much as the next guy, and especially hate how Google tried to shoehorn such a bad product into every google user's lives. But that doesn't mean their vision was nonsensical. It was probably a bit of tunnel-vision though, and it unfortunately did not take their existing userbase's sensitivities into account. Oh well.

I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.

Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)

Googles biggest fail was probably that Plus was too nerdy, and that they tried to sweep everything into it. Youtube, Reader, Photos, even the search was harmed by it. And at the end the people just got another unsexy service where nobody they cared for was available. Google should have done it the google-way, lettingnit work alongside other services and on it's own, instead of trying to copy facebook and then forcefeed everything to everyone.

Nevertheless, I think the biggest problem google made with g+ is thinking that it was necessary at all. Social can be important but not every major tech company needs their own brand of facebook, it's just not necessary from any perspective, even a business one. Microsoft made the same mistake when they tried to out-google google. That sort of thing is dumb, and indicative of excess vanity. Let google be google, let facebook be facebook. If you think you actually have a better product offering that overlaps with some other company, great, put it out there. But don't set it as your google to stand toe to toe product wise with all the other tech giants. Concentrate on your own strengths, don't try to be something you're not.

I don't really understand Google's strategy. They got rich by providing useful features for the web at large - walled sites like Facebook should be considered the enemy, not something to emulate. If I was Google I would be providing easy to use blogging site, blog readers and a loose social network that encouraged links to other sites (perhaps similar to HN on a larger scale) that would be easy for third-parties to integrate.

Instead they killed Google Reader and made G+ and youtube just as much as a walled garden as Facebook.

But there was simply not much to do, contrary to what you'd expect with all the other Google services available.

Google wanted a pretty graph of humanity's friendships. So they worked really hard on making it nice to input those relationship through those pretty circles (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMZP-oyOII).

But inputting those vertices in the graph does not benefit users, and they feel that. In Facebook, it worked because Facebook had focused on the users: they wanted to be someone's friend to use Facebook's communication tools. And Facebook had a great chat system and a competent publishing platform.

G+ never had a great chat system (Hangout always felt sluggish, obtrusive and undifferentiated, unlike GTalk and Facebook Messenger) and its publishing platform was subpar (Medium came six months later, Tumblr had been around for seven years, both have a much superior editor and offer a more pleasing reading experience).

You can't beat the competition with a lesser core product.

The big fear was that Facebook would do email and it'd not be as good as Gmail but everyone would use it because it was social, that Facebook could even do maps or web search, same thing. So G+ became seen as a "save the company" hail mary move.

After some years passed Facebook rapidly reached middle age, their attempt at email sort of flopped, they didn't launch dozens of new products and the ones they did launch didn't replicate their earlier success, and the fear ebbed away. Meanwhile the G+ product managers (mostly Vic Gundotra) had burned a lot of bridges by forcing G+ into everything. Whilst Larry/Sergey/Eric were afraid of Facebook he had absolute power because they felt only G+ could save the firm. When it became clear that was an over-reaction he lost his protection and was out.

The idea that Google could build a unified social network across all their platforms was good. The idea that Google could also make a Facebook-clone was good.

Every other idea they put into G+ after that was awful.

No one forced google to just open up G+ to the entire world. I feel they botched the launch of G+ by allowing scattered masses to join instead of totally nailing smaller groups like how Facebook did.