
Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+ - amlgsmsn
http://mashable.com/2015/08/02/google-plus-history/
======
KineticTroi
I believe Google+ failed simply because it was Google. Had it had any kind of
a human, friendly, or small startup, perhaps people might have given it a try.

People don't want Google integrated with their YouTube account, coupled with
their Facebook pages, coupled with their email, coupled with their contacts,
and on-and on it goes with Google. No respect for separation of the
information.

I darned sure didn't like it when Google took over my YouTube experience. Now
I have pray that I don't accidentally access a sexy YouTube video with the
computer logged into my wife's account. Now, all of my previous viewing will
be highlighter all over her YouTube page the next time she logs in.

These guys are really stupid in trying to unify every internet experience we
have all into one nosy mother-in-law. It's the essence of evil they promised
not to become a part of.

~~~
Bartweiss
Google did manage to strike the worst possible balance of size and network
effects. Facebook was good because everyone was on Facebook - Google+ was bad
because everything _else_ was on Google.

The positive network effect of social media is that it helps you find everyone
you want to talk to. The negative effect is that it denies you the ability to
compartmentalize your behavior - to talk about indie bands on Pitchfork, and
then secretly enjoy Nirvana on Youtube.

Google+ didn't have any active users, so it lost the positive network effect,
but it was incredibly aggressive about forcing you to use it in every place
possible (and with more sharing than you wanted). The result was that they
_only_ got a loss of compartmentalization, without any actual social benefit.

~~~
dredmorbius
Thank you. That's an _excellent_ expression of Google's negative value
proposition IMO as a social network.

I actually _somewhat_ like G+. But _because Google has so much of the rest of
my life_ , I'm:

1\. Not willing to participate on G+ as "me" under a real name.

2\. I'm going to withdraw as much _other_ content from G+ as possible.

------
sakopov
I honestly think that some areas of social networking phenomena are dying and
Google+ came on board at the beginning of the end. From my observation,
Facebook is dying a slow death. I see most of my Facebook "friends" aren't
posting anything anymore and just browse. Some only post check-ins when they
travel, otherwise everything is deadly silent. I have my Facebook disabled
most of the time, but every once in a while i login to see what's going on
with some folks across the pond and all I see is everyone reposting news.
Facebook has become a boring place to read quirky news and get on with the
rest of your day. And when discussing this with some friends who were at some
point active on Facebook I consistently get the same "there is nothing going
on it" response. I can't imagine that this will continue for much longer.

Frankly, another big reason G+ failed is because most people using Facebook
didn't need anything else. Google essentially tried to fix a problem that
wasn't even a problem. Yes, Facebookers complained about privacy concerns, but
those who did were likely not even 2% of the entire user base.

~~~
akshatpradhan
Facebook did great at bringing people together online, but once we were online
together, we had no clue what to do. Meetup is the opposite, encouraging you
to meet offline and I think that's the future of social networking.

~~~
debaserab2
Facebook actually solves that quite well - that is my primary use of Facebook:
to schedule and Rsvp events with friends. One of the key reasons it works so
well for that is that it's ubiquitous (something that meetup is not)

------
bane
Google lost the plot with G+. The reason that Google is where it is is because
it made things people wanted to use, they _naturally_ came to use these
things.

Around this time Google just simply _forgot_ this, killed reader, killed ig,
killed labs, and then tried to herd people into using an inferior social
network, then tried to shove all of google's other products into this terrible
product nobody wanted to use.

This is different than what happened during the search engine wars, where
google's product was simply _better_ than all the others and that's why people
used it.

~~~
davidgerard
People really wanted Facebook the product without Facebook the company. G+ had
a golden opportunity, and they blew it.

~~~
allendoerfer
I assure you, that nobody outside our bubble ever thought something like that.

------
toyg
I think where G+ really missed a trick was in not publishing a write-API. They
were clearly trying to force people away from FB, but an open API would have
allowed for a smoother migration over time. Without automation, most people
simply couldn't be bothered to post the same thing twice. Third-party twitter
clients, which were being shafted around the same time, would have jumped on
it.

This mistake, coupled with a double-edged focus on privacy (as people shared
with less friends, others wouldn't see much content) and their disastrous Real
Name idiocy, was their undoing - G+ became a me-too.

~~~
allendoerfer
You do not want to be the service people just dump their stuff to. Google
tried that with Buzz and in failed even more horribly than +.

What you could do is be the service people use to write to other services and
then gradually lock them out. Unfortunately the fight you have to take on
against the platform you are cannibalizing is really something a few fast
moving guys, who fly under the radar and have nothing to show for anyway, can
do for a few months, but nothing a Google scale corporation can do.

~~~
toyg
Realistically though, _nobody_ can now beat facebook at network effects, not
big nor small. And that was already the case when G+ was launched. The best
you can do is to allow people to try out your system with little investment,
and then slowly persuade them to prefer it to the old system.

Buzz failed for very different causes: it was a twitter clone that offered no
additional functionality and even compromised your gmail privacy.

~~~
tomjen3
Facebook has too much network effect - if you don't want to share your life
with your parents you need to be on a platform they aren't.

In my case I never friended my parents on FB, and keep G+ for family - which
means I don't share things with the wrong group.

~~~
9872
For normal people. sharing their lives with loved ones is a positive. Creating
a _social_ network for antisocial people makes no sense.

~~~
tdkl
You never share some things only with certain groups of people, because of
relevance or intimacy ?

~~~
9872
I don't think you understood the comment I was replying to, which advocated
going to a totally different platform from the one your parents use in order
to not share your life with them.

------
dperfect
Lots of people throw out technical or social reasons for G+ failing, but I'd
point to the factor that tends to be one of the most important make-it-or-
break-it variables for any new venture's success (according to Bill Gross[1]
anyway): timing.

If G+ had been released pre-Facebook (or at least earlier in Facebook's
history) I doubt any of those technical points would have been show stoppers.
G+ has/had a lot of little advantages over competitors, but none large enough
to bring about the mass migration that G+ so desperately needed. With _good_
timing, none of the little annoyances or problems with G+ would have likely
mattered. Good product; unfortunate timing - at least with respect to the
fundamental product being offered.

[1]
[http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reaso...](http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed/transcript?language=en)

~~~
jdp23
Actually I think G+'s timing was just fine. Sure, earlier would have been
better, but in 2011 a lot of people were very ready for an alternative to
Facebook.

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

~~~
dredmorbius
Google were _tremendously_ effective at killing off early enthusiasm.

Nymwars. Relevance. Hinky UI (and still). Lack of search. Poor formatting
options (and still almost wholly neglected.) Forced integration. Too many SEO
types.

Much of it screams "this sovles Google's problems, not yours."

------
nkoren
Hindsight is 20-20, of course. But in this case, _foresight_ was 20-20: G+ has
failed in almost exactly the way that I (and everybody I was talking to at the
time) expected it to. For me, the saddest thing about G+'s failure has been
its plodding inevitability.

It would be really interesting to see a more in-depth analysis of how this
happened. It didn't happen because the folks at Google are stupid: from top to
bottom, they are wicked smart. So how did such a mass delusion take hold? I'd
be genuinely interested in hearing from people who expected G+ to succeed, and
_why_ they had this expectation, and how its failure has changed their
perceptions.

~~~
candu
I've seen similar patterns elsewhere: company X brings on powerful, smart, and
egotistical person Y, who browbeats others into believing their pet project Z
has to be top priority; those who disagree with Y leave Y's team (or perhaps
leave X altogether); groupthink takes hold, and this perception of priority
becomes reality; groupthink mutates into sunk cost fallacy to convince
everyone to keep going.

This process is often reinforced with incentive structures:

\- raised salaries for everyone working on Z; \- higher performance bonuses
offered to top performers on Z; \- greater social cachet for those working on
Z (more mentions in Q&A sessions, presentations, etc.; more marketing punch;
more opportunities for advancement; air of secrecy; etc.)

Once the incentive structures take hold, even smarter employees have rational
reasons to perpetuate Z.

~~~
gamesbrainiac
Understood, but its not that google went social that was a problem, it was
that they had no vision about how to do it in the first place. They perfectly
executed their vision to create a social network, but people already had that.

It has little to do with egos and everything to do with bad planning and a
panicked knee-jerk response to the crisis at hand.

------
rogerbinns
What killed G+ for me was how hard they made it to actually read anything.
Originally it was okay, but as time progressed they favoured images over text,
and then kept spreading text out further and further apart. I took a
screenshot at one point where I highlighted in yellow the actual readable
content, making up a tiny proportion of the page:
[http://i.imgur.com/d8qwVpc.png](http://i.imgur.com/d8qwVpc.png)

Of course they had years of experience in helping people read content with
Google Reader, so that had to be shut down and lessons ignored. Then they made
sure there was no API, or even RSS feeds, so no one else could make a more
efficient reader either.

Or in other words, did anyone at Google actually try using their product? (I
seem to say that a lot about different Google products.)

~~~
alexschleber
I've been saying the same thing for ages... there even was a hashtag around at
the time in 2012 if I recall... #waronwords

Google could never decide if they wanted to G+ to basically be Instagram (not
surprising given Horowitz' Yahoo/flickr background), or if there was something
to be done along the Interest Graph angle a la Reader / HN / Reddit / asf. The
info density for the latter has always been terrible on G+, not to speak of
various other iniquities that text-heavy posts (or post shares) had to endure
for years, like much smaller images in the stream for the longest time.

Really they should have just split these two use cases into either two
separate apps (maybe to prescient for 2011), or at least provided alternative
UI views. Of course, a solid API including Write could have solved it as well
as you alluded to.

------
pothibo
I think where Google could build momentum is to try to go for a _private_
ecosystem where everything you store (photos, notes, etc.) would be private.
The facebook opposite.

That would be a solid alternative to Apple's ecosystem and you would see the
benefits of going from Facebook to Google.

Google has a much better chance of competing against Apple's photo/notes/cloud
services than it would beating Facebook. Also I believe there is going to be a
tendency in the next few years to move out of Facebook because of the social
network effect people want to get out of.

Google would be the only solid candidate for anyone not wanting to jump into
Apple's products.

~~~
allendoerfer
Google tried something like that. The whole circle idea was about control for
the user of who he shares stuff what content with.

Facebook cannot be killed with something so similar to Facebook like Google+,
much like Google cannot be killed with something like Bing. They are at a
local maximum amassing lock-in and buying up every improvement on the status
quo.

What might ultimately kill them is either EU regulation, a big Chinese
domestic market or some jump in technology or business model. The end result
might again look very similar to what we have now. I think in the beginning it
would start out as something like Whatsapp or Siri. It could be something that
takes over or kills advertisement completely like Amazons various tries to
create a platform for all online commerce.

~~~
prapam2
Whatsapp was a good strategic investment. Most of my friends spend more time
on Whatsapp then facebook.

~~~
allendoerfer
That is why I said something like Whatsapp could have been a potential
Facebook killer. Imagine them gaining users quicker than FB - what they did -
and carefully branching out to take usage time away from FB - what you
described.

------
EarthLaunch
I've never seen this mentioned so I'm doing to mention it. I suspect Google+,
and the cannibalizing of other projects, was directed by Page. He became CEO
in April 2011. G+ launched in late June 2011. April-May-June is about 90 days.
From the article:

> The massive Google+ launch effort had all the hallmarks of a technology
> corporation: a code name ("Emerald Sea"), __an artificial timeline (100 days
> to launch!) __, a dedicated secret building ( __with the CEO relocated there
> __) and a full PR blitz once completed.

The CEO puts his office in the G+ building. I see that as Page being the
driving force behind this. The article says:

> "Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill
> us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive. "I am
> pretty sure Vic managed to frighten Larry into action. And voila: Google+
> was born."

But for what actually happened to have happened, Page had to have bought into
the idea independently (assuming he is independent). Every article I've seen
about G+'s failure fails to mention anything about Page's role - this article
goes _out of its way_ in this strange way to try to say Page was just
'whispered to too much'.

> By early 2014, less than three years after its big launch, the Google+ team
> had moved out of its coveted building to a spot on campus further from Page.
> Gundotra announced his departure from the company that April — in a Google+
> post, of course — to pursue "a new journey."

The G+ push/force was still in full-swing on the consumer side through 2014.
Evidence that Page was the driving force, not Vic.

This was an organization-centric article, but I wish it had mentioned the
other potential causes for G+'s failure, such as being invite-only during the
media attention, and the rude forcing of people over from other platforms
(Reader, YouTube, Maps, business listings, etc).

~~~
mycelium
> The CEO puts his office in the G+ building. I see that as Page being the
> driving force behind this.

No, that reads as Vic Gundotra being the driving force behind this and Page
buying in fully. If Page was the driving force, Gundotra would have put his
office by Page's.

> Page had to have bought into the idea independently (assuming he is
> independent).

I don't think Page was independent. He was a brand new (in some sense) CEO
with a lot to prove to shareholders and he had to make a big splash. Although
his leadership has improved and he clearly came back to power with a vision to
unify Google's services, he still had a vibe of being a bit unsure.

My perception of the management at Google is that they mostly come from the
engineering side and don't typically do things like overhype themselves or
their projects—they generally call the importance of their projects as they
see them.

So along came Gundotra, who had spent 15 years at Microsoft in the most
political meat grinder on the planet and was wayy more politically savvy then
the rest of the management—and sells Facebook as an existential threat and G+
as salvation with unflinching confidence, plus a little bit of brown-nosing
that would go a long way with an insecure new CEO. Feeling this versus the
even-keeled/mildly pessimistic reporting styles that the rest of his
engineering management had, I think Page bought into it hard, and G+ was
history.

Although it's circumstantial evidence, the conditions inside the G+ team were
insanely political versus other Google orgs. I think this is a mirror of
Gundotra's style.

> The G+ push/force was still in full-swing on the consumer side through 2014.

Really? Everyone knew it was dead. I perceived that as merely consolidating
the unified logon/identity system they'd build in G+.

------
jacquesm
I think there is a very simple reason why this did not take off: google is not
in it for the long haul on social projects (see 'orkut') so why invest in
their platform?

As long as a company pulls the plug on projects that involve user investment
with some regularity there is little chance that they'll be able to launch a
social platform requiring significant investment from the audience they seek.
You can kill only so many projects before people will become wary of trying
out your next project, no matter how hard you try to force it on them. In
fact, forcing it on them reeks of desperation and that is another nail in the
coffin.

Technology and the real-names fiasco were for sure factors but I just don't
see google 'getting' social.

------
brohoolio
You could tell right away that Google didn't have a clear vision for how
people would use the service. They could have differentiated from Facebook
with an emphasis on privacy or decent features. Instead of a social experience
where people could interact with each other, you got something that was you
could post something on your profile and people could comment on it. There was
nothing special about the experience.

I've seen this multiple times when interacting with Google employees, just a
sense of removal from the real world that permeates some of their choices.
Stuff like, "oh, I guess the page on accessibility should be accessible."

~~~
bsbechtel
When you build a work environment that encourages people to spend their entire
waking lives at work, this may be one of the outcomes.

~~~
asdfologist
How's Facebook's work environment any different?

~~~
bsbechtel
I am sure there are differences, and many factors beyond the time spent at
work that affect product decisions. At the same time, insulating your
employees from the real world by providing services at work that allow them to
spend more time at work is bound to create a disconnect between those creating
your products and their ability to understand customers who operate in the
real world. This may have been why Facebook was slow to figure out
mobile...all their employees were spending all their time at work on desktops,
and failed to see the fundamental shift happening as their users started
accessing the site via mobile. Keep in mind I'm just speculating here...I have
no inside knowledge of how either company operates.

------
nnq
Puns aside... you can'd do social without having some kind of _face_.

Facebook really has _face(s)_ (puns aside again): it has Mark Z's friendly
looking _face_ , it has the _faces_ of all your friends and family that are
already there, it has a warm-looking humane-looking brand (not with a damn
mathematical sign like "+" _in. its. freaking. name._ ), even the annoying-to-
most-geeks UX has a "face" that you can recognize. Even when they do their
ubercreepy stuff we all complain about, they do it with a _face_ , you
viscerally hate it or you get freaked out just like you would get freaked out
by a stalker watching you naked... you don't just feel like your privacy is
invaded by a mathematical equation. Facebook, the company, really feels like a
"person" and not a "thing". (Yeah, to me at least it feels like an ubercreepy
person for whom I want a restraining order and maybe a vicious guard dog too
and few extra alarm systems to keep it as far away as possible... but it's
still a "person"). And it's not a reaction, Facebook wan't born out of a
reaction to MySpace, it "authentic" and people can feel this about a brand.
That's why corporations can spend millions on buying a brand that "feels
authentic" instead of "manufacturing a brand".

Facebook started with a bunch of cool faces and a cool story. They even made a
movie out of that story! And a totally shitty technical platform, but that
didn't matter. The gargantuan effort to make Google+ succeed looked like some
folks' effort to make Esperanto into the de-facto international language
instead of English. _You needed the literary face of a Shakespeare, and the
military face of a British Empire to make a language succeed, an beneath them
an authentic foundation (English was not invented as a reaction to Latin!)._

------
Marazan
When G+ launched people were primed to move away from Facebook. When people
saw that G+ was both twitter and facebook in a single package they were wowed.

G+ was ready to succeed big.

RealNames killed G+, the most transparently Moronic decision of the last
decade or so in tech

~~~
PuffinBlue
It wasn't just real names though.

I agree the world was ready for a Facebook/Twitter hybrid network with the
semi-anonymity of twitter but the interactive capabilities of Facebook.

In fact, I think it still is TBH.

But Google+ also integrated into your email and all other Google products. It
was like Facebook but without the walled garden.

So yes, real names were a part of it but Google really wanted 'real
everything', which was presumably to increase the users juicy ad relevance.

The 'real everything' thing had another effect - confusion. Google+ to comment
on YouTube? I had friends literally not know Google owned YouTube, so when
they needed this account to set up channels and comment they rightly noped out
of there.

The name, Google Plus, didn't help. It was never its 'own' thing - it sort of
'was' Google, and Google is massive and has many services. If they have even
limited it to a semi-walled garden network they might have had some success
with real names, but so open, so interconnected and pervasive was just asking
for failure.

They do have a chance still though. Get rid of real names, make it a separate
network walled off from the rest of Google properties, still public like
twitter but with the granularity of circles for semi-private stuff and it'll
fly.

It's really a good service, much better than Twitter and despite the more
'anonymous' nature of the network it would still keep laying the golden
advertising egg for them.

~~~
bambax
> _The name, Google Plus, didn 't help._

Yes! What a stupid, simplistic and limited name. Most product names with
Google are stupid ("Play"?!??) but Plus has to win the stupidity contest.

I remember when Vivendi's CEO invented "Vivendi Plus" (in 2000 or so) and even
registered vivendiplus.com just to show how unprepared the company was (at the
time of the announcement, it was a big surprise at headquarters...)

Brand extension never works, NEVER. There are many books written about this
subject, one of the best being "Positionning" by Al Ries.

Google Video failed, Youtube thrived; there is no "Google mobile", but Android
is doing pretty well, thank you very much. Gmail is not exactly "Google Mail".

Google Maps is a counter example, maybe because it feels like an extension of
search.

------
lnanek2
> Google ripped out its elaborate internal video conferencing system and
> forced employees to use the Google+ Hangouts video chat feature in Plus,
> which one employee described as "janky."

This is still the worst fallout for me. Whenever I need to do a video call
with someone it involves lots of hair pulling trying to get everyone to press
weird "say hi" buttons on profiles before it will ever even manage to show
messages between each other, let alone video conference. Half the time it
doesn't and we all just use Skype which is reliable. Google Talk was actually
good, Google Hangouts is just broken and killed it for an inferior product.

------
javiercr
> The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the
> thing taking off

This is a constant in every struggling project / startup.

------
zargath
I never understood why Google tried to create a "closed social network inside
the web", when Google (almost) is the web.

The technology behind Google+ seems nice tho ( so was Wave ), very snappy but
that is probably because of lack of users. I like some of the communities
there, but it seems to die slowly.

At the same time, a lot of people never gave G+ a chance, because they felt
Google already had too much power. It felt like giving Google the "missing
link". At least, that is my experience.

~~~
aikah
I never gave G+ a chance in retaliation of the closing of greader. I'm a
pissed off user, and since Google has 0 notion of user satisfaction, I'm glad
G+ is a failure."Free services" providers should not underestimate the fact
that pissing off users will have a negative effects on potential new "free
services". Who trusts Google with any service lasting on the long run ? I
certainly don't. Why should I invest in something that will be gone soon?
because I know in my guts G+ WILL be retired.

~~~
hga
Unless Wikipedia is lying, Google+ launched almost 2 years before the
announcement of Google Reader's imminent shutdown.

~~~
EarthLaunch
In closed beta at first.

During those years, they let Reader languish, it was treated as a dead
project, then finally shut down. So it felt like a continuous series of
events.

~~~
hga
Hmmm, I found this [http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/10/how-survive-
switch...](http://www.thewire.com/technology/2011/10/how-survive-switch-
google-reader-google/44069/) which talks about Google ending the Reader social
features as of the end of October 2011, sort of in favor of Google+ but that
wasn't done well/thought out; I can't figure out if it was out of private beta
by then.

So the narrative of at minimum neglecting Google Reader in favor of the not a
substitute of Google+ would seem to be correct.

~~~
EarthLaunch
Nice find!

And yeah, at the time there was discussion about how they should have kept
reader and somehow rolled it and its users into G+. Reader was their only
organically successful social sharing product.

------
bitL
I can't help myself, but since Google+ I feel like Google lost its way -
forcing us by nagging to accept various unpleasant and not very well thought
out ways to use their services while seeing their search quality deteriorating
(feels to me like Altavista now, XX search result pages clicked through and
still being unable to find relevant stuff way too often). I am really worried
about their future now and hope they won't end up as SUN...

------
amelius
> "Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill
> us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive.

He could also have said: "Apple is going to block ads in their new version of
Safari. Soon they will introduce iPhone native search, and nobody will ever
see Google again."

------
Metapony
One aspect of Google+ that always grated on me was that the name was terrible
branding. I don't know if I'm in the minority for feeling this way, but with
with all their other services that one gets tied up with, you don't want a
'plus' you want to think about the social aspect as a compartmentalized,
separate section. They'd have been much better off calling it something else,
or at least trying to be a lot quieter about tying all of it together.

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+.

------
mark_l_watson
Sure Google made some mistakes with Google+ but it is a success as far as I am
concerned. I use Google+ about an hour a week, Twitter about 20 minutes a
week, and Facebook about 15 minutes a week.

If Google+ has a few hundred million regular users, that sounds good. Why the
need to comptere with Facebook on numbers?

~~~
AreaGuy
By that logic, they never should have shut down Google Reader, though, right?

Reader was my top visited site daily by far. Nothing replaced it.

~~~
EarthLaunch
I still have a reflex to type 'rea' in the url bar when I'm looking for
interesting content. And every time it makes me irked with Google+.

------
cddotdotslash
The article touched on this briefly, but my personal opinion about why Google+
failed is because it isn't needed. People who have spent hundreds of hours
cultivating their Facebook profiles, building out their networks, etc. had
zero reason to switch. Any time I asked a friend to join Google+ the answer
was always "Why? Facebook works fine." While people in the tech echo chamber
are always searching for new products and new ways to use online services, the
vast majority of people simply don't care. Honestly, G+ could have been the
best platform in the world and I doubt people would have switched only because
what they had already worked.

~~~
Negative1
Indeed, it broke Google's #1 rule for new products; make something 10x (i.e.
substantially) better.

Google+ was great. It just didn't do a much better job of solving a problem
that Facebook already had.

One strategy would have been to integrate Google+ into Google Contacts,
Photos, Messaging, basically forcing people to integrate their social network
into their phone and gmail contacts, messaging etc... People would have been
pissed, but it would have actually provided a unique utility (one place for
all your social interactions).

A bold move is what it takes to dethrone a king.

~~~
aleh
I would give up Gmail, really.

------
prapam2
G+ tried to be too much like facebook social netwrok. Instead it should be
like topic related like reddit more dicussions rather then memes. I do liek
the communities and collections feature. The Android app is also very well
designed.

------
dgudkov
Google+ missed the chance to become an introvert-style social network.
Facebook with its 'Like' buttons and tendency to self-exposure is clearly
targeted at extroverts. Google+ could've made its bet on introverts.

~~~
pohl
I'm surprised to hear "likes" associated with extroversion.

I tend towards a mere like when I'm feeling more introverted. To me,
commenting and sharing are the extroverted alternatives — and liking is the
absolute least one can do that still technically qualifies as "social".

Lowering the friction to increase social participation is precisely catering
towards introverts, from my perspective, and that is what Like and +1 do.

~~~
dgudkov
Since "like" counters are public they are often become a form of competition
or a way to boost self-esteem which is a very extrovert style of
socialization. Though I'm not sure what introvert-style socializing should be.
I guess it should include mostly small groups (circles?) because introverts
usually don't large social groups. Also a different approach to "friending".

~~~
pohl
Oh, I see: you're thinking from the perspective of the person competing to
obtain the likes (an attention-seeker), but I'm thinking from the perspective
of the person deciding whether to give one. Thank you for clarifying that. I
see where you're coming from now.

------
paulsutter
Google plus has one terrific feature: it's a safe choice for both websites and
users as an oauth login. Most people have an account, but nobody uses it as a
social network (unless you know a lot of Google employees).

------
mkawia
As a social network it has failed , But as an Identify Platform it's really
good . My g+ profile while doesn't have many posts like facebook/twitter or
instagram but has the most data ,my search history,my app downloads,youtube
browse history, knows my phone ,my number ,All the places I have lived ,places
I have worked . If I log on a new device with my gmail/g+ all over sudden I
have all this data working to make my surfing better.

Now if only they used that data to make a better Google plus feed ,It's the
feed that died.

------
dimbirol
There's no Google+ landing page.

If you want to participate and create a g+-account you'll automatically sign
up for google search, gmail, google drive, youtube, google maps, play store,
google maps with no option to opt out.

Now who thought this was a good idea?

But even if someone wanted all that, if you signed up for your business to
have a youtube channel and a g+ page, you don't get your custom vanity URLs
with the chosen account-name. That's remarkably bad UX.

~~~
dredmorbius
I pointed that out to Vic and Shindig YEARS ago. Drives me fucking nuts still.

These days I blackhole services that do this. Pinterest most recently.

~~~
dredmorbius
"Shimrit". Not "Shindig".

Fucking autocorrect.

------
orf
Facebook's killer feature, the one everyone uses, is messenger. The timeline
is dead, none of my friends really post much anymore, the primary reason
people I know still use it is because of the ubiquitous messenger presence. If
google went after that with a messenger focused network I think they would
have had a great chance at taking over Facebook.

~~~
EarthLaunch
If Facebook's really just a messenger then it's in trouble. You use a
messenger to chat with people you actively want to talk with, and that type of
messenger service booms then disappears after a few years as most people move
on. (AOL, ICQ, MSN, AIM, Skype, etc)

------
amelius
> As Google stumbled and failed and stumbled again, Facebook grew larger and
> more influential.

This just tells me the market is not open, and allows for no competition.

------
kolev
Google+ did not make big mistakes. For example, their mobile experience is
much better. People just didn't want to leave the social network most of their
friends are on already. Same with Ello. People are lazy. But Google+ pressed
Facebook to innovate. We won, Google lost.

~~~
dredmorbius
No, it committed numerous cardinal errors.

#nymwars, noisy content (with poor controls), confusing UI, and intent that
was _expressly_ counter to users' interests really didn't help.

See Tim O'Reilly's Aug 23, 2011 post requesting topics for conversation with
Bradley Horowitz:

[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/A1qHbykj...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/A1qHbykji1f)

As I commented recently on a private re-share:

What's telling to me are:

1\. How many times Real Names / Nymwars came up.

2\. The alienation issue: how Google were (and frankly, have) demolished
goodwill with their core tech evangelist community (I used to be one, I no
longer am).

3\. How lacking Google's first instance of G+ was: no search. For reals.

4\. Requests that remain unanswered. Especially subscribable circles / feeds,
RSS, and tags.

5\. How many names I recognize here. Many are in my Circles. A few are long
gone.

------
olivetree365
How many Google+ failures do you think it would take to match the gigantic
write off that Microsoft made for acquiring Nokia? The answer is a lot.

~~~
pavlov
Not really comparable. Microsoft bought a unit with tens of thousands of
employees, factories around the world, a (modestly) profitable featurephone
business...

All that had some value in 2013 (although perhaps not the amount Microsoft
paid for it). Microsoft's own decisions post-acquisition expedited the loss of
value and resulted in them writing off the entire purchase price.

------
joesmo
Didn't Google learn from Buzz that the world didn't want another social
network of the kind that already existed? I guess not.

Google's just amazing at building technology no one wants/needs. Wave, Buzz,
G+, are all great examples of that. If only they could hire someone like me
(and many others with common sense in this area, I'm far from special in this
regard) who would have told them even before release the G+ would have been a
failure. And Buzz and Wave and probably a whole bunch of other great
technology that ended up being useless.

~~~
probably_wrong
> Didn't Google learn from Buzz that the world didn't want another social
> network of the kind that already existed? I guess not.

I disagree - I think a lot of people were expecting exactly that[1]. But I
think the big mistakes were a_ forcing every Gmail/Toutube user to use it (and
with real names, which was even worse), and b_ stop halfway and claim "it's
not a social network, it's an identity service", essentially giving up.

Had Google stuck to the "Facebook for those that hate Facebook", I think it
could have worked.

[1] [http://xkcd.com/918](http://xkcd.com/918)

~~~
joesmo
That's possible, but it would have required proper execution from the Buzz,
and later, the G+ team. From a security / privacy point of view Buzz was worse
than Facebook almost instantly, though it clearly tried to emulate Twitter
feature-wise. Considering that the security / privacy angle was the reason
most people who didn't like Facebook didn't like Facebook, Buzz failed
miserably, exposing conversations and connections that its users didn't want
exposed. That was even more of a mistake than the real names issue as it
instantly destroyed credibility in the network (at that time I don't even
think Buzz had been completely rolled out). At that point, at least, a shrewd
executive would have realized Google's inability to deliver a proper social
network (as if the Youtube social experience didn't already indicate this) and
not started G+. Either way you look at it, G+ was an avoidable failure with
years of warnings that it would fail and at least one defining failed
preceding network (two if you include Youtube).

------
tdkl
G+ could be more popular if Google knew how to launch products - not tech
demos. They launched the thing and made it invite only, when people were eager
to try it out. I don't know who had this clever idea, maybe they thought they
could repeat the Gmail launch or FB exclusivity.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's one constant criticism I disagree with strongly. Google released G+
_too early_ and _before_ it was ready. Some months to listen to criticism and
address it would have helped massively. But Google were neither ready to
iterate or listen.

------
michaelochurch
Facebook succeeded in a crowded space, full of mediocre but wealthy
competition, because of where it started. It began at Harvard, moved out to
the Ivies, then the top 100 universities, then all universities, then
everyone. By this point, it had iterated its way out of the technical failings
of the initial product (except for the use of PHP, which still hasn't been
entirely undone).

Google+, when it started, was superior in almost every way to Facebook in its
first few years. (That's not a fair comparison. Facebook was a startup social
network; Google+ came out of the gate at 120 mph.) It had Hangouts, which
would have been a killer app if people had actually used them as a sharable
social space (i.e. to "hang out") as the execs thought they would. The problem
was that Google thought its muscle would allow it to take a greatest-fixed-
point approach (i.e. a "stay popular once popular" strategy) whereas any
social network needs to focus on the _least_ fixed point, because that's where
it's going to land. It had wealth but no users and no credibility, and it
wasn't able to get those.

Hangouts are genuinely useful and there was some guy at Google who argued that
courting independent game developers (and getting high quality products,
rather than third-string products and Zyngarbage from mainstream publishers
who expected Google+ to fail and weren't going to use their best stuff) would
have allowed Google+ to grow organically and inductively, with the same
"cognitively upscale" initial user base that made Facebook, thus proving
Hangouts and moving to progressively larger subsets of the population. It
became obvious that the failure of Google Games (and, possibly, of Google+ in
its entirety) came from Google's leadership not listening to him. I wonder
whatever happened to that guy.

~~~
powera
The one person at Google more wrong than Vic Gundotra still thinks that G+
failed because people didn't listen to HIM enough. How shocking. (and
seriously, do you really think one person could have fixed the turd of G+ even
with a billion dollar idea?)

~~~
michaelochurch
Google+ needed to establish a core group of users who (a) weren't associated
with Google, and (b) liked their offering better than Facebook, and (c) were
in a space that Facebook would have trouble taking over. Games was prime
territory, because Facebook fucked it up by letting Zynga be its tapeworm for
so long. If we could show caution and attention to quality in this space,
people would have been more likely to trust us in a time when they were (much
moreso than now) upset with Facebook.

U.S. Facebook engagement was actually _dropping_ in 2011 and the Zynga games
were the reason why. People hated those games.

Google+ could have gotten some more air time with that idea. What they did
with it, I can't predict. Sometimes, more air time means not crashing;
sometimes, it just means crashing later. It would have had a chance with Real
Games, though, and I'll take "a chance" over "no chance" any day of the week.

Anyway, I'm glad that Google lost. A closed-allocation company with stack
ranking deserves to get beaten. So there.

~~~
S4M
> U.S. Facebook engagement was actually dropping in 2011 and the Zynga games
> were the reason why. People hated those games.

That doesn't make any sense. Facebook goal is to have people staying connected
to Facebook as much time as possible. Be it to check their friends status, the
fan page of their idols or to play whatever game is trending. If Zynga's games
are popular, the better for them since they monetize that popularity, and the
better for Facebook since people spend more time on their platform, and they
can water their virtual crops or whatever in between checking the cat pictures
some friend posted and reading about the new thing some other friend's baby
did. If Zynga's games lose their popularity, someone else will overtake them
(it was King with Candy Crush) and Facebook will not be impacted.

