
Why Google+ Failed - D_Guidi
https://onezero.medium.com/why-google-failed-4b9db05b973b
======
oneshot908
I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched...

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.

~~~
unreal37
Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we
weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really
really inside baseball.

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

~~~
jfarmer
I took `oneshot908 as saying that the Google+ team had a broadly isolationist
attitude. Their distance from both co-workers / potential internal
contributors and customers/users was a reflection of this and that trickled
down into poor product decisions.

~~~
iamnotacrook
I doubt it. There's just no connection between them at all. Think about all
the bad things you read about Amazon - how Bozo treats people, how employees
are treated, especially the warehouse staff, plus a website the HTML
hairdressers love to hate on. It's still the first choice for retail and cloud
services for millions of people around the world. Separate cafeteria! I love
Hacker News!

~~~
whatshisface
If the full story is death by a thousand cuts, do you want a thousand-
paragraph comment?

------
hunter23
I find it ironic that the author is trying to detail core reasons why Google+
failed when they themselves admit they don't use any social media.

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.

~~~
netwanderer3
That's my thought as well. Google+ seemed like just another "me too" platform.
Though Google attempted to steer it into another direction later but it was
simply too late by then.

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.

~~~
dorgo
>They don't even have to wait for shipping

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?

~~~
Eug894
Amazon don't work in all countries. And the ability to walk in a retail nearby
to look at the product you want is valuable too.

~~~
netwanderer3
Indeed. Unlike many developed countries which have those big box retail stores
available in almost every neighborhood, local commerce activities in
developing countries are dominated by smaller businesses, and their stores are
often distributed randomly across a city.

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.

------
CommieBobDole
I think most of the damage from the "real names" policy came from the their
sudden and draconian enforcement of it at exactly the wrong time. Just when
the service was starting to build momentum, they initiated an effort to find
and punish anyone who'd previously signed up with anything that didn't look
like a "real name", in many cases locking them out of their entire Google
account.

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.

~~~
Corrado
One of the worst things to come from this Google+ thing was the removal of the
"+" for searching on Google itself. You used to be able to use " +go +lang "
and get results that were guaranteed to have those two terms on the page. Now
you have to use double quotes and other tricks. _sigh_

~~~
CondensedBrain
On the plus side, Google at least tells you when it omits words and offers to
put them back in now. Not that it does much good. Something about Google the
search engine changed and now it's impossible to get good results for anything
but the most obvious queries. I tried looking up why every commercial pot pie
says to let it sit for 5 minutes.

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.

------
imgabe
I think a lot of it came down to their "invite-only" launch. I remember a lot
of my friends were excited to try it. Some of us were able to get invites,
some weren't. Eventually the people who couldn't get on right away just said
"screw it" and went back to Facebook. The rest of us followed because that's
where we could interact with everyone and not just the people who happened to
get on Google+.

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.

~~~
trevize1138
Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine
for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. I know a few friend
were hopeful that Google+ meant they would no longer see posts from their
racist uncle or gullible aunt. Start out with that same kind of exclusivity
and hopefully it builds this exclusive mystique so when you open it up to
everybody you get a flood. Perhaps the big difference they didn't factor in is
FB did this when relatively few people were on social media so they couldn't
help but grow whereas Google+ needed to recognize they were trying to enter an
already saturated market.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
Facebook had what turned out to be an accidentally brilliant way of
bootstrapping networks and trust.

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.

~~~
sah2ed
Facebook started out as a social network where you could get what we today
regard as PII (e.g phone numbers of the opposite gender and such) for Harvard
students, and its engagement numbers were really good (based on Zuck’s
previous experience with the Harvard-only FaceMash).

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.

------
jrockway
The ranking system did kind of annoy me. We used G+ heavily inside of Google,
and lots of interesting people posted interesting things. As time wore on, I
felt like I got less and less of that stuff. A coworker would say "did you see
so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it
until I begged someone a link. I followed them. They followed me. The post had
300 +1s. But I could never see it.

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.

~~~
tannhaeuser
I guess it's a fair post-mortem for G+ the product, but I'm personally more
interested in what happens to content on G+. For example, Linus Torvalds
blogged on it (eg. dead link
[https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY...](https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCYpi5)
about why he switched away from Suse), and many others as well. The content is
why I occasionally went there, and why people outside Google posted there
(assuming a big name won't let them down); certainly not a generic group
chat/mail site.

We're being told on [https://plus.google.com/](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?

~~~
the-rc
It's not static content. It would have been expensive to keep the services
running. Not just in terms of computing and storage, but also for the
headcount. Speaking of the latter, who would want to work on maintaining a
read-only version of a project frozen in time? (The enterprise version will
evolve, etc.) I am not even going into the legal implications.

~~~
tannhaeuser
As dredmorbius posted, the content is going to live on at the Internet Archive
just fine (Google could maybe redirect to them, don't they?).

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?

~~~
the-rc
What IA is doing is their business. I don't see Google linking or redirecting
to them ever, for many reasons: security, (mostly) opening themselves to
litigation from random users, etc.

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.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Fair points, but I guess I'm just puzzled how we've come to be fascinated by
the business and technical side of Google+'s demise more than being worried
about loosing almost all digital history of our times (not with Google+
specifically ;). Rendering HTML in web browsers seems like a problem solved 25
years ago, and so does authoring and server-side rendering (eg. SGML can pull
metadata and compose fragments out of databases or whatever you want). But the
2010's have, I dunno, "educated" us to see script-heavy approaches and
"platforms" as progress when in reality they're anything but, neither
technically, nor from the PoV of author independence, nor for publisher
syndication, nor for readers suffering through ads and tracking. Maybe dynamic
content is the first we're going to loose, so with a 2010's media blackout, in
2035 we'll all be wondering what this decade was like.

------
mattkevan
The problem with Google+ is that using it felt like _work_.

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.

~~~
SamBam
They learned the wrong lesson from the Gmail invites. The artificial scarcity
of Gmail invites worked better than their wildest dreams. People were selling
invites on eBay, trading then, etc. It worked really well to generate buzz. So
of course they tried to replicate it. But if you're the only Gmail user among
your friends, you can still email them. As you say, if you're the only Google+
user, you have no one to talk to.

~~~
gravitas
I really think the author missed this social point, and it's an extremely
important one. As a tech nerd, I had fellow tech nerds who had G+ but I was
unable to secure an invite, like many others. It was just frustrating and
caused people to develop an anti-G+ attitude before they could even get onto
the service.

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.

~~~
jimktrains2
Speaking of wave, Google wave too. Really excellent idea, but if you couldn't
collaborate with anyone but yourself (because of invites), you aren't really
"collaborating" and all the benefits of wave are lost.

~~~
dullgiulio
Indeed, it's funny that Slack is going IPO these days and they have (in some
ways) developed a successful Wave.

------
fyoving
I always thought the name had something to do with it, "google plus" doesn't
sound right specially for a social network, also "Hangouts" is a terrible
name, it doesn't internationalize well nor does it work for an enterprise
setting, and "keep" is a good app but it should be called "google notes"
nevermind they already used that name on a now defunct product.

Google has been worse at naming products than they have a right to be.

~~~
mattkevan
Feels like the same people responsible for Mircrosoft's product decisions in
the 2000s have now all moved to Google, with a slight twist in strategy.

When a Microsoft product didn't do well they called it something different and
relaunched, hoping no-one realised it was the same old thing – e.g. Zune
Music/Xbox Music/MSN Music/Groove Music/Microsoft Store etc.

Google now* just kills it and launches something else, sometimes more than
one, hoping no-one remembers the still-cooling corpse of the previous attempt.
For example, they're now on their ninth attempt [0] at a messaging service
with no end in sight.

*Google Now is also dead.

[0][https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-ninth-
attempt...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-ninth-attempt-at-a-
messaging-service-will-be-based-on-rcs/)

~~~
fyoving
I don't mind the killing off of stuff that doesn't catches on it's a mark of
dynamism.

~~~
mattkevan
It suggests a lack of focus, and gives users a reason to not trust their
products. Why should I adopt service n when it's probably going to be shut
down in 12-18 months, after the launch of service n+1?

~~~
sowbug
You shouldn't, because you're a member of the early majority, late majority,
or laggards, in _Crossing the Chasm_ terms. Innovators and early adopters are
more comfortable trying out a startup's offering that might be imperfect or
might fail.

Most people are conservative like you. Your sheer numbers are why crossing the
chasm is so important for the long-term survival of a new offering.

~~~
mattkevan
Quite a pointed _you_ there. Thanks for that.

I love discovering and trying out innovative new products, and have made it a
large part of what I do professionally.

However, some offerings I take more seriously than others.

With Google, if it's not search, data or ad related (i.e. the stuff that makes
them money), it's generally the case it's not going to be around long-term.

------
rchaud
The "Non-organic growth" section covers Google+'s biggest sin for me. They
unilaterally created G+ profiles for everybody with a Gmail account with no
prior warning, and with no opt out.

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.

~~~
sverige
This was the moment that I ditched Gmail and made my first vanity domain for
email. I have a few Gmail accounts now, but they are separated: one for Maps,
one for YouTube, etc. I don't use any of them for actual email.

------
xamuel
The decision to name it "Google+" was an epic blunder. You wouldn't ask a girl
at a club if she's on "McDonalds+". You wouldn't ask a member of your church
if they'd like to connect on "American Airlines Plus".

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.

------
Causality1
>Project Hancock was the internal code name of the project designed to do
this. It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user. This
is actually much more complicated than it sounds; it took a team of engineers
somewhere around three months to accomplish it.

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.

~~~
jimmies
This, Google was shoving the Hancock down to every Google user.

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+.

~~~
rchaud
Google Talk was fantastic. The desktop experience was great, and the mobile
apps were flawless, even on Nokia Symbian and Blackberry 6 OS.

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.

------
hateful
While I do (mostly) agree with this article, it fails to mention the #1 reason
why I never used it. I couldn't post something on someone else's page. I could
post something to my "feed" and they could happen to see it. But I couldn't
post something into their "feed" (wall, timeline) where all their friends
could see it and then comment on it.

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.

~~~
leadingthenet
I never understood why you would want to do that. I also never see people do
that on Facebook, is it an American thing?

~~~
joncrane
Well Happy Birthday wishes is the big one.

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.

~~~
sverige
Actually, the story I hear from people under 35 or so is that Facebook is for
old people like me (mid-50s), though I've never used it. My wife does, though.
It seems awful.

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.

~~~
joncrane
I mean the "post on another person's wall" functionality within FB, not FB
itself.

------
duxup
I feel dumb for saying it, but I didn't understand "circles".

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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I understood circles. I spent two hours carefully categorizing everyone I
added into the perfect Venn diagram.

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

~~~
conductr
Ya I never used it but assumed that was their way of trying to be Facebook
LinkedIn and Twitter all at once. Problem being the world already had those
services and by being separated the circle management is done for you.

~~~
TremendousJudge
The fact that they already existed separately is not a compelling argument by
itself. As a counterexample, many people owned both mobile phones and music
players in 2007, but the iPhone was a huge success anyway.

~~~
conductr
I agree with your statement. But counter example is weak. It combined a
backpack worth of physical devices, some of which you may have already owned
or not. Phone, gps, camera, music, laptop, game console, etc. oh and btw now
all those devices were internet connected automatically with no wires/WiFi.
The value add was compelling.

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.

------
f055
Turns out "engineered social interactions" is indeed an oxymoron. Also,
Google's work structure where most product leads don't have dedicated tech
teams but instead have to win over tech groups to work on their projects
result in too much technocracy and too little empathy in projects like this.
Can't say I feels sorry for them though. Google masqueraded itself as an
idealistic company and a champion of the internet but consistently kept
undermining the free web in pursuit of money. It's a great business model and
they made a huge commercial success. But the "do no evil" bullshit and the
cult-like attitude of googlers is just pathetic.

~~~
cycrutchfield
It’s “don’t be evil”, not “do no evil”. There’s a subtle but important
difference.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Really? How does one distinguish being from doing in that sense? Scoring
actions on an evilness scale and taking an average?

~~~
kragen
Not being evil is achievable; most people achieve it. Doing no evil is
impossible, even if you tie bells to your pants to avoid accidentally stepping
on bugs.

------
goldcd
The non-organic growth was more than 'just creating me an account' \- there
seemed to be a fair amount of "stick" to help me move.

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.

------
sumanthvepa
I have to disagree with the author. Google+ did not fail. Had it been a
startup rather than a Google project, it would have been considered an amazing
success. The problem was that the goal of being a Facebook killer was just too
ambitious. Had it instead been a social feature amongst Google products it
might have served valuable purpose for both Google and its users. Sadly, in a
large corporation, every project has to meet some IRR hurdle, even if not
explicitly. And at Google that hurdle was artificially high and Google+ could
not meet it. This is why Alphabet makes so much sense, as it allows risk
levels to be segregated.

~~~
xamuel
But all its success came from strong-arming people into using it, using the
leverage Google had with all its other products. So it makes zero sense to
compare it to a startup.

~~~
ksclarke
That's not where all its success came from. That's the one downfall the
article got right. It was successful before that. Trying to shoehorn a bunch
of people who didn't want to use it into using it was the mistake. It was
doing just fine before that and it would have continued to grow organically.
It was never going to be a Facebook replacement though. It was better than
that.

------
Marazan
Realnames. It was entirely Realnames on launch.

Realnames Realnames Realnames.

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

~~~
salad77
Real names AND the instant account lock with no hope of reversal if your name
failed the opaque real name check. I lost access to a gmail account and
everything associated with it because g+ didn't like my name. Account totally
locked. Gone. Forever.

~~~
GeekyBear
Reading about other people being locked out of their Gmail account (with no
recourse) was exactly what prevented me from even trying Google+.

~~~
cesarb
For me, it's gone further: reading about other people being locked out of
their gmail account with no recourse, because of that real names policy, is
the reason I've never logged into _Youtube_ (since, as far as I understood, to
log into Youtube you had to have a Google+ account). I still watch videos, but
never while logged into gmail (and as a consequence, I've never commented on
any Youtube video, or posted any videos I might have recorded).

------
pbuzbee
I think Google+ failed first and foremost because there wasn't any reason to
switch.

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)

~~~
shearskill
Oddly enough kids are using GDocs for messaging in school and during study
sessions, etc. Not something to build a network around since they are used as
ephemeral ad hoc chat spaces.

~~~
whymauri
GDocs gets used because it's not blocked/censored by the school's IT.

------
swivelmaster
This is a classic case of smart people jumping head-first into a problem with
only a superficial understanding of what makes something successful.

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.

------
aerovistae
> My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot.

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.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
Are you in school or training? And/or do you work with members of your social
circle? And/or does family live close? If any of these are true, I can see how
Facebook offers little value.

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.

~~~
ablation
I don't have Facebook, and all of these needs for connectivity are taken care
of by WhatsApp group chats, essentially. It feels far more intimate and
immediate than Facebook ever did too.

~~~
marssaxman
How does one discover such WhatsApp group chats? In my very limited
experience, it is just like other messaging apps; I can't quite imagine how
you would use it as a social network. Am I missing something?

~~~
aerovistae
I use WhatsApp this way. It's not a matter of discovery-- it's a matter of
creating a group with your existing friends and then keeping in touch with
them day-to-day through sharing things in the group chat.

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.

~~~
stallmanite
I do similarly with sms/iMessage. It’s actually a great way to keep in touch
and seems more “real” than Facebook because it’s me directly and specifically
communicating with my friends and the public “performative” aspect is absent.

------
londons_explore
The key element of why Google+ failed is deeper than these arguments.

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.

~~~
skybrian
They tested it on Googlers. However, that's an atypical audience and more
testing with a different group would have helped.

~~~
ggambetta
They tested it on Googlers, and we were extremely vocal about the things we
didn't like, but were ignored by the higher ups (read: Vic), using the
argument you mention - "oh, but you're not the typical users".

------
nobrains
Google Plus failed because of the following reasons:

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.

~~~
ramses0
As an outside observer: Real Name was a play at true identity management.
There are two true identity managers currently out there: LinkedIn for
business, and Facebook for personal.

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.

------
rafiki6
I will agree with the author that FB isn't invulnerable, but IMO Google+
simply wasn't compelling or different enough by that point for people to move
over from FB. The problem was the Google+ tried to be a better FB than FB.
There just wasn't anything substantially better from the user's perspective to
encourage a shift enmasse.

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...

------
docker_up
The reason why I never used it is because it tied my gmail address to the
Google+ account, and it forced a Real Name policy. I didn't like how
dictatorial it was, and with Facebook around, there was no need to have to bow
to Google and follow those rules. So I refused to sign up.

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

------
eitland
Worst part is they refused to keep and improve the parts that actually worked
well.

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

~~~
Already__Taken
> Google plus had circles

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.

~~~
dredmorbius
No, Circles required users to self-categorise _other people 's_ content.

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.

------
sandGorgon
Instagram is very unidirectional. So is wechat (the instagram-like feature
within China).

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.

------
usr1106
I don't think it's important whether Google+ failed or whether Facebook
declines or not.

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?

~~~
phicoh
The is an open standard for messaging (XMPP). That didn't prevent Google and
Facebook from starting on XMPP and then closing it off.

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

------
ninedays
It failed because the point was to unify the privacy policy of all Google
services (which means data collection would be less spreaded out across the
different Google services). The Google+ front (the product users used) was
more an excuse for people to sign up and agree to the terms. It had some
interesting ideas but was never on the path of success after the initial goal
was completed.

------
qwerty456127
Googel+ was by far the best social network I've ever seen, the only one I've
got addicted to and the only one I've actually written posts to. All Google
had to do with it was adding youtube-like recommendations (many people
complained it was "empty" while I had a waterfall of great content in it just
because I actually subscribed to everybody I could discover, to those they
were subscribed to etc) and leave it as it was without introducing more and
more complicated concepts.

------
TomMasz
Almost all of my posts on G+ were autoposted from my blog. This was true for
most of the people I followed as well. It was just another checkbox for
promoting content hosted elsewhere. Interaction occurred in comments on my
blog or on Facebook but almost never in G+.

------
pishpash
Nah dawg, Google+ failed because it didn't try to do any of the things that
people who desired a different kind of social space might have wanted but
couldn't get on Facebook at the time, perhaps things like anonymous accounts,
private groups that didn't transitively leak information, or a space for
collaboration on Google Docs. In other words, it made zero innovation over the
incumbent, except for "circles", which was ill conceived.

~~~
qtplatypus
What do you mean transitivelu leak information? It was possible to set up a
community that only members could read. And once the nymwars where won you
could get pysdonymious accounts.

------
hartator
> You’ve reached the end of your free member preview for this month. Become a
> member now for $5/month to read this story and get unlimited access to all
> of the best stories on Medium.

You have to pay to read Medium now?

~~~
smitop
Most articles are free, but some articles are designated by their authors as
member articles. Authors get paid when members read member articles.

------
combatentropy
Computer networking in general and social apps in particular are still young,
in civilization's history. We are still figuring this out. Maybe in a hundred
years we will have a good grasp of what works. If the writer is right, then
Google Plus's lack of traction was from the interaction among several subtle
ingredients.

~~~
skybrian
Yes, even Facebook's "successful" model is kind of a failure because it
encourages people to spam all their friends and relatives with crappy memes.

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

~~~
zrobotics
So similar to IRC. As much as I hate their desktop client, Discord is actually
ticking all the right boxes for what I want out of social media. Ironically
one of these things: broadcasting specific things to specific groups, is
something G+ tried to do. If I see an interesting paper, I don't want to share
that on FB and have my grandmother making confused comments. But I do have a
discord channel w/ some college friends where something like that is
appreciated.

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.

~~~
slouch
I like this. I'm a Discord user with no real life friends on the service
interacting with me, but I'd love to be able to suggest channels that don't
exist on the WordPress server I use.

------
eddie_catflap
One thing I don't see mentioned too much is just how slow it was. Not to
mention confusing. I expect a lot of people were simply put off from using it
after taking a look.

------
yongjik
I'm not a social person, so maybe I wasn't a target audience of Google+, but
for all its flaws I actually loved asymmetrical following model. That means I
can "follow" a friend of college friend whom I might have met twice, just
because they say something interesting, without wondering "Wait do I still
count as their friend? What if they remember me and I really don't? It's gonna
be awkward..."

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.

------
feral
I am completely convinced the problem was the invite-only launch, as others
have said; let me explain why I think this:

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](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/](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.

------
inlined
I was there at Google when G+ launched. I think there were a few other initial
issues that prevented it from landing:

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.

------
jeffdavis
G+ worked pretty well. I took shared family photos, a few thoughts, news,
interesting stuff I found, got comments, etc. It did what I wanted.

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.

------
revskill
I think G+ failed because of design system. The effect of auto popup when you
hover the + button is annoying, at least to me.

The overall design is "circle", which i think is annoying for most of people,
too.

------
fareesh
Too late to the party and no compelling reason to switch for normal people.

~~~
myhf
Late? It launched the same year as Instagram and Snapchat.

~~~
fareesh
It was a different product from a photograph app. It was a product more
similar to Facebook / Twitter.

------
slyall
[http://archive.is/cytZl](http://archive.is/cytZl)

------
joe_the_user
G+ failed by not understanding Facebook _and_ by not having any intention of
giving disgruntled Facebook users what they wanted.

My sense is Facebook in particular brought as many people "online" as did all
the previous Internet innovations combined.

Essentially, it did this by giving the functionality of previous online
communication approaches while minimizing the noise _and_ merging these
together into a "real" relationship called "friend". (Facebook didn't do more
than email, blogs and chat, it did _less_ but in a way that people wanted).

Online data can easily form a stream of bits and bytes each person puts
together into a different form. This stream only becomes "a thing", a
"document", etc when some group of people all perceive it the same way.
Facebook made "friends", "posts" and so-forth into "things".

Just as much, human relationships have always had a tension between social-
contextual identities and universal identities, between "real" identities and
assumed identities. Facebook did a decent job of balancing all of these in
that worked for a given individual and that worked for the-person-relating-to-
the-given individual. Facebook's privacy model was broken and inherently
broken but it still was key to Facebook's success because it's what people
want, what human social interactions assume - ie, you can tell your friends
things and they'll remain "secret". It's not true in the real world and it's
not true on Facebook but it's what people to believe.

And yeah, G+ failed by not understanding any of this. I don't know exactly how
many people understood this then aside from Facebook.

------
acdha
I think there's another angle to the feedback loop: they pushed everyone in
the world into Google+ with no thought about notification quality or even how
to handle abuse. Most of the notifications — which were displayed on every
Google property — were noise (“<rando> who asked about your Craigslist post 10
years ago just joined Google+!”, “Someone you never heard of added you to
their ‘open source’ circle”) and it took months before there was a way for
those not to generate push notifications in the iOS app.

By the time they started doing basic UX work most people I knew had already
either uninstalled it or been trained to ignore it.

Killing Google Reader was a similarly poorly-considered move: they forced
people to leave a system which had frequent high-quality interactions into
something which was the exact opposite, and didn't even do basic QA testing on
mobile for several months. Since Reader was disproportionately popular with
people like journalists, the family go-to IT people, etc. the first impression
many people got was “don't bother”.

------
devit
I think what they should have done is add functionality into Chrome that would
allow and encourage you to automatically import all the data in your Facebook
account into Google+ and then post to both accounts.

At the time, Google had much more goodwill than today and there's a chance
people would have used it just so they could use Google instead of Facebook.

~~~
unreal37
Trying to use your dominance in one space (search, or browsers, say) to
actively steal data from a competitor (scrape Facebook!) with the intention to
destroy that competitor is something lawyers have wet dreams about.

I mean, Facebook would have destroyed them in court.

~~~
devit
I think it would have been important enough for Google to be worth fighting no
matter the cost, since it would have been the only viable way of replacing
Facebook.

The user would be consenting, initiating and running the procedure on his own
machine, so there's a plausible argument that it's fine.

Regarding the antitrust argument, you could also argue that Facebook is a
monopoly in social networks and that preventing such a data transfer is
anticompetitive.

------
stevehiehn
People opted into other social media platforms. G+ forced it on you one day. I
think many people resented that.

------
iabacu
Google+ leadership was not trying to build a product and grow a userbase.

They were concerned about driving metrics, and only tangentially building a
product.

As if you could shove a half baked social product down on enough peoples
throat by inorganic means, then hope that the network effect will do most of
the work for you.

------
habosa
How about asking the other question: what made anyone think it would succeed?

Facebook was already dominant and Google+ offered nothing really compelling
besides a half baked circles/groups thing that took forever to manage.

Google had no special social insight, just big-company confidence and a lot of
engineers and dollars.

------
johnwheeler
What blew it for me was the way it automatically added gmail contacts to your
circles. I started seeing posts from an auto dealer I got in a trivial dispute
with years prior over e-mail. Why Google thought I wanted that is unbeknownst
to me.

------
wazoox
I had a hell of a great time on G+. Almost all of my current internet friends
are from there. I had great chats with many interesting people, like David
Brin. Really if you were part of the "engaged users" group, it was fantastic.

------
nolite
They lost me on the "real names" fiasco

------
sbr464
Honest question, how much would it really cost to just keep it going? Vs
killing the service, even if not investing in growing it? It seems odd for a
company so large to not have its own social platform.

~~~
erik_seaberg
You can't fire and forget a service at Google, promo-driven churn in the tech
stack will break it sooner or later. So you have to staff every service for
indefinite maintenance, or kill it in an orderly way. This is also what
happened to Reader.

~~~
pishpash
So now our key internet services last about as long as the average team
tenure. We really need open standards so we can rely on the internet as the
infrastructure, not some cloud provider. Google will die one day like other
services. One has to wonder about the fate of all the artifacts people entrust
to it: they will be erased just like every time before.

------
sunstone
The killer for me was that I thought the "circles" I created were mine. I
didn't realize, and assume Google wanted me not to realize, that the people I
put in circles could see each other.

Once I did know I then put everyone in their own circle, probably not what
Google+ was hoping for but by then I distrusted the entire system.

------
unsignedint
Actually, I still miss Google+. It was one of the few places I could have
meaningful conversation about topics.

Google+ enticed extended circle of group to interact with my posts. I feel
Facebook is really about getting confined to their own bubble; even when such
posts are marked 'pubilc' I rarely see anyone outside of my group interacting
with me.

I guess the closest major one right now is Twitter. Google+ was certainly
hitting some sweetspot between Twitter and Facebook for me.

------
TracePearson
"But the thought of someone coming along and making a new social network, one
that doesn’t have Facebook’s flaws, seems hopeless. After all, if Google, with
all its vast wealth and talent, couldn’t do it, then who could?"

Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat... The greater issue to me doesn't seem to be
who can beat Facebook but rather, what's going to keep Facebook from buying up
any real threat that's not backed by one of the big 5 tech giants.

------
gitgud
To me the name sucked, google+ is equivalent to _more Google_. It doesn't
really make sense why they choose that name, seems lazy and boring...

Also from what I can remember, the main features were its integration with all
Google services and never really did anything interesting, so it was kind of a
boring platform that no one wanted to join (I don't remember anyone being
excited about it in my _social network_ )...

------
makecheck
Restricting the launch to an arbitrary subset of people made no sense. I
wasn’t going to create “circles” if only 4% of the people I wanted in the
circle had accounts. I wasn’t going to create events that could only invite
1/3 of the people. I wasn’t going to “share” things if I thought only one
person would see the post.

Then there was the bridging. They ruined every service owned by Google by
shoehorning direct links to Google+.

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
My biggest qualms with G+ was that it was constantly changing...

I would log in every few weeks/months and something was different.

G+: Hey, check out this new feature!

Me: But I uhhh...

G+: Oh, and we implemented this too, isn't it great!?

Me: Well sure but...

G+: And we removed that one feature that you did actually kind of use, it's
now this.

Me: I just wanted to use your service for 5 minutes right now, not learn about
how great it was. And now my 5 minutes is up.

G+ was pivoting to a fault since day 1 imho.

------
foobar_
They should have kept Google Buzz and Google Talk alive

~~~
mehrdadn
I think the reason they got rid of Buzz was a legal issue re: privacy. Not
sure how practical it was to keep it alive, but I do miss it.

------
bpyne
I remember that my wife and I were late to Facebook, having been convinced by
our daughter's babysitter that it made staying in touch with people easier. We
built out a Friends list and were having a great time reconnecting with people
from our childhood. When Google+ came on our radar the idea of trying to
rebuild connections in another platform was not appealing.

------
echelon
Perhaps a better approach would be a protocol that allows for complex
integrations to be built by the power users, but a simple product for the
masses. Twitter before they shut off their API.

Imagine one of these social networks actually had APIs for you to manage
contacts, group them, control publishing and consumption, etc. Most people
wouldn't interact that way, but the power users would.

------
efitz
I read the initial white paper on circles before Google+ ever existed; I was
super excited that they seemed to grok human relationships in a way FB never
did. But the actual product disappointed me and I never could quite articulate
why.

(I can’t find the link right now but will update when I do)

------
RickSanchez2600
No business plan, no vision, lack of leadership, tried to copy Twitter and
Facebook. Even Yahoo 360 was better.

~~~
varjag
Circles was a nice feature, which however was promptly matched by Facebook.
You can't win on features in this market.

------
asicsp
A few Google+ communities I was part of were good, probably benefitted from
being small and focused. Compared to Facebook groups, the ability to select
sub-topics within the community made it easy to navigate.

These days, I'm reluctant to use any free Google product, their lifetime is
uncertain

------
mehrdadn
For what it's worth, regarding the asymmetric interactions, if my memory
serves me right, it seemed to be Google+ that made Facebook introduce the
notion of "Following" people. They were a good idea, just not a substitute for
symmetric relationships.

------
ajcarpy2005
The interest graphs gathered in the several years G+ was online should be
valuable to Google still. I wish G+ was still around, although I could get a
GSuites account and still use Google+. Most likely there are not a lot of
users anymore.

------
lorenzorhoades
The OP has obviously never used Instagram, which for my generation is much
more popular than Facebook. Almost every reason listed for Google+'s failure,
is a feature of instagrams massive success.

------
scotty79
My experience of Google plus was following HN circle or sth only to have
birthdays of a lot of people I don't know littering my calendar. I never
bothered to clean it up. I think they are no longer there.

------
hartator
Google+ implementation was also particularly bad. With plenty of bugs in the
frontend. Like it was a pain to use and wasn't pleasant to look at. And no one
understood what a circle is.

------
dfps
Why did they end it? Was it losing money?

In some ways it seemed superior to the other giants, plus it was tied to most
peoples' google accounts.

Why didnt they just add advertisements, paid posts, and clean up the ui?

------
the-rc
Talin! I was always a bit amused that people like him, who wrote The Faery
Tale Adventure, Music-X or the Amiga Installer, would work on a social
network. Same with Andy Hertzfeld.

------
magwa101
Didn't fail, they got a global login to all their systems.

------
tempodox
Come on, it's Google. They would have killed it someday anyway. Had it lived
longer, there would only be more angry users that wouldn't have got their data
out.

~~~
hkmurakami
Will they kill Gmail or YouTube in the future as well in your opinion?

~~~
varjag
Killing Gmail was probably on the roadmap when Wave was introduced.

------
miguelmota
Google+ was a ghost town because every google user had an account but nobody
used it so it felt strange being on there and not seeing any activity.

------
radley
Google’s consumer branding makes a lot more sense if you replace “Google” with
“Smurf”.

Smurf+, Smurf Assistant, "Hey Smurf...", Smurf Home Hub...

------
achiang
Google+ failed, but it begat Google Photos which is not a failure.

obDisclosure: I'm a Googler, but joined way after G+ both launched and failed.

------
Moxdi
from what i read, they tried to brute force the proyect, google+ was
esentially an startup and they didnt followed the startup way

------
yaro014
Google+ did not fail. * They shaped it to be news feed from the beginning *
They used it to develop social networking feed * They used it to develop news
feed * They implemented both in YouTube and Google News app.

If they would just fiddle with YouTube they might get into trouble but now
they've tested everything they needed and rolled it to other products. Google+
was never meant to be Facebook replacement.

------
waylandsmithers
The only thing that ever gave it legitimacy to me was the fact that Linus
would write posts there.

------
exabrial
Two things in my opinion:

* Made it hard to "post something on someone's wall"

* Terrible redesign after redesign

------
knorker
"And when the execs are extremely smart people making 10 times the salary you
do, there’s a tendency to give them the benefit of the doubt. Surely they must
know what they are doing."

If you think vicg made only 10x an L5 salary then I have bad news for you.

One day I'd like to hear the real reason he left.

------
joedevon
From the consumer perspective, Google+ failed because it sucked.

------
airnomad
It died because Facebook was better. As simple as that.

------
qbaqbaqba
Medium is unreadable on mobiles.

------
esimov
When Facebook will fail?

~~~
rahuldottech
Not anytime soon. Tech folks understand the privacy and ethical implications.
Good luck explaining that to the layperson.

In many developing countries, FB is how many, if not most people get all their
news and interact with family and friends.

Can't take that away. Because there's no real alternative to it.

------
andrewl
Google engineer Steve Yegge said:

 _Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms
from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric,
Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don 't
get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The
Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch,
and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members
marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the
Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but
no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the
joke was on me._

The full Yegge rant is at:
[https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611](https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611)

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
While I agree with much of what Yegge said in the post, I think it's extremely
far fetched to say that Google+ failed because it was lacking an API when
there are 50 other more likely reasons you could point to. Forget
understanding platforms, at the time Google fundamentally didn't understand
_social_.

~~~
gist
The saying 'camel is a horse made by a committee' applies to this situation.
There was almost certainly no base creative drive when creating the actual
product. Most things that end up being good are driven by someone who is
viewed as somewhat crazy but has enough power or force to get what they want
and/or steam roll others.

Not to mention I am sure they are confusing smarts with luck. The decision
makers think of themselves as where they are because they are really smart and
less lucky and opportunistic.

~~~
dekhn
camels are amazing creatures that are more useful than horses in a wide range
of situations.

~~~
vharuck
That's the point of the adage. The hypothetical committee was supposed to come
up with a fast animal to ride (horse). But then everyone wanted it to address
their specific concern. In the end, they created something good in many
situations (camel), but at the cost of the overall gaol.

~~~
gist
What's interesting is that in a buyers mind (or a users mind) there is often
something that outweighs many practical concerns which a committee would say
'a deal braker'.

One example of this is the very first Porsche 911 that I bought years ago. I
had never tried to sit in the rear seats I just saw it had rear seats 'ok it
can seat 4 people'. Of course the reason I bought the 911 had zero to do with
practicality or what you would consider 'features'. It was entirely emotional
that was the reason. So I had ordered the car and went to the dealer to pick
it up. And then found that only small children could fit in those seats (or at
least without great distress). But I still took the car and have since bought
3 newer models. The rear seats come in handy to throw stuff behind you
packages and what not. And in a pinch sure someone can sit there (on
Cayman/Boxster no go).

------
dredmorbius
Social networks, like space launches, are complex systems, with many failure
paths and few leading to success. Unlike sppace launches, there can also only
be a single leading platform in a winner-take-all regime, making success far
less likely than in rocket engineering.

G+ failed for multiple reasons, despite being successful in numerous
particulars. I miss it, though I don't regret its passing.

As with other criticisms, this one is on point in noting that the failures
were of leadership (and _all_ the way up the stack: Bradley, Vic, Larry,
Eric), and architectural.

Site mechanics (good points by Talin), unreliable messaging, and the "let's
cram this down everyone's throats" elements all left a very bitter taste.

What Talin omits in particular (though it's alluded to briefly) was the extent
to which Google directly fought many of Google+'s biggest enthusiasts, with
#nymwars (the Real Names policy), noted, being only one of the most notable
instances.

I'll also distinguish G+ fans from Google fanbois -- the latter were (and
remain) toxic to the company. Thos includes many (though not all) of Google's
annointed "TCs" (top contributors), many represented among the G+ Google+ Help
community, where active frustration of efforts to help users and groups
migrate off G+ in its final months and days was a constant factor.

Another element creating tremendous distrust was Google's repeated ridiculous
statements as to the site's success, openly mocked in the press. In early 2015
I proved by a random sampling of profiles that a minuscule fraction of the
billions of registered profiles were posting publicly on a monthly basis,
methods and results confirmed several months later, on a far larger sample, by
Stone Temple Consulting:

[https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-
on...](https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-
plus/)

Later 2018/2019 analysis of G+ Communities further cemented these findings.
This also showed the huge value of _regularly contributed, fresh, relevant
content_ to success, over raw subscriber counts. Post recency was a far bigger
prediction of other engagement (comments, +1s, reshares) than subscribers.

See:

[https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%2B_Communities#Google.2B_Community_Characteristics_and_Membership)

That Google, a notoriously metrics-driven firm, could not or would not
credibly analyze or report such data was a huge blow to its general
credibility.

------
asdf21
It's legit just not caring about customers.

\- Want to keep using RSS? Fuck you.

\- Want to keep using Google Wave? Fuck you.

\- Want support on your adsense account? Lol, nope.

\- Account got banned or limited inappropriately? Fuck you.

\- Want to keep your YouTube and Google accounts separate? Fuck you.

\- Want to get your domain whitelisted in Gmail? Fuck you.

I could go on and on..

They simply do not care about their customers.

~~~
Andrex
A customer is someone who pays for a service, and I'm not sure the listed
examples qualify.

~~~
dna_polymerase
People keep repeating this bullshit, but it is wrong. People using their
services, albeit free of charge, are their customers. They are the ones who
click on ads. They are the ones who drive most of their revenue. Everything
around search serves the same purpose: keep people happy on their platform so
they keep using search and click ads.

------
busymom0
I am sorry for the off topic comment but I can't even read this article
because medium now shows me a "Sign up for an extra read" popup without any
way of closing it. Medium is going so down the tubes, it's become impossible
for me to read anything there. Does anyone have a way to bypass the sign up
pop up?

~~~
gulperxcx
I don't think there's any way around that pop up on a mobile browser.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Safari reader mode?

~~~
gulperxcx
I forgot about that, Chrome has that too. That should work.

------
mrbanks
Totally missing from that blog post: People won't want to use something if
Google tries to cram it down their neck. I lost count of the various dirty
tactics they used to try force me onto it.

That is the number 1 reason why it failed.

------
aurizon
Apple sent Agents Provocatuer to sign up and try to add all the shit Apple
knew was failmodery. So hookers, thieves, pests, and other conpeople infested
the place soon drove people out. The hangout eyes = horrible. Once Apple did
this, it was snakebit and doomed to die...

