For the life of me I don't understand why Google+ didn't just target professional use cases and kill these guys. The bar is just soooo low and makes such strategically obvious sense. Actually, they could still probably do it - if anyone wants to put me in charge of Google+ for the next 3 years, all your LinkedIn problems will be over.
Google wanted to take on Facebook. I'd contend that they didn't succeed, and I suspect most would agree. LinkedIn has a market, but it apparently isn't the one Google wanted.
Interestingly, there are people posting on Google+ that make for the occasional, decent content. Far more, certainly, than the awful "inspirational" memes I see so often on my LinkedIn feed.
> the awful "inspirational" memes I see so often on my LinkedIn feed
Heh- my instagram feed is clogged up with inspirational memes. Interestingly, they're posted the most by the least successful people.
Linkedin skeeved me out and I stopped using it after they started spamming me constantly to add all these random people I barely know to my professional network, like a dude I sold a couch to on craigslist in 2007. No thanks, Linkedin. No thanks.
Indeed, the internal argument was that Google was blind to all the data within Facebook, and thus FB would be in a stronger long term position to sell targeted ads. LinkedIn, in contrast, is already Google indexed. It'd be difficult to bootstrap their company without exposure, since it's a double sided social network.
But when has Google ever really gone deep and sustainable in a vertical like this? They don't seem to have staying power in anything that isn't a pure internet infrastructure essential. LinkedIn doesn't seem to be the kind of thing they could nail, or would commit to even if they did have some fledgling success.
Speaking for myself, not OP, and as someone who's criticised G+ strongly on numerous grounds:
Google+ started, at least, with a rather strong professional cachet. Its inaugural user cohort trended very strongly to Googlers, Xooglers, their immediate contacts, techies, and a number of folk with aligned interests.
And, unfortunately, SEO and marketing types. A very nearly fatal disease in a content-sharing community.
Google had a number of tremendous mis-steps. Privacy and confidentiality were very large among them, and I've little confidence that Vic Gundotra's G+ of 2012 could have executed on a professional-networking G+ successfully.
I think that with many of the very, very hard lessons Google's experienced, and I very sincerely hope has learned from, it could today.
Google could offer a G+ professional network which, at the very least, would benefit Google itself as a recruiting device. Possibly paired with other activities (women in STEM outreach, summer of code), and platforms (something Github-esque).
Google offering a general interest recruiting platform is probably a non-starter, in that it's a direct conflict of interest (Google would want the best candidates for itself), and in light of the illegal anti-poaching collusion case (still ongoing IIUC). Pity.
Google also don't need to directly monetise G+, an could avoid many of LinkedIn's more obnoxious practices.
