I've always wondered why Google+ did so badly. I love google apps for everything but social. Seems like a missed opportunity to make something that moves away from Facebook as the norm.
Even worse, particularly for YouTube users, the first version of this "integration" didn't respect at all that a YouTube channel is not a person, and a person is not a YouTube channel. (It's a many-to-many relationship, morons.) And when they forced Google+ comments on YouTube channels, the damned thing didn't even slightly work correctly.
Basically, they unforgivably fucked-up their own product and made all of their most engaged users hate them with a passion. Honestly, it's a miracle they didn't get more bad press for that shitstorm.
Apparently, it's now possible to once again have a YouTube or Gmail account without associating it with a Google+ account. But of course for people who lived through that campaign of awfulness, there's no way to undo the damage and get my Gmail and YouTube accounts back the way they were before Google+ fucked them over in the first place.
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For what it's worth, I'm not a Facebook user. I wasn't prior to Google+ and I'm not now. So maybe I'm the freak. But I don't think I'm alone in my opinion of Google+ or the sheer incompetence of its rollout.
And that's sad, because I really wanted them to beat out FB.
I also think making an incredibly careful integration of Google Reader, the one social network they did right, would have helped (though not cancelling it would have been best of all). I still wish they simply evolved Google Reader into a fully fledged social network.
Oops, that should be good will, not for will.
I think I have these accounts:
* Personal Gmail
* Professional Gmail
* Google+ account somehow auto-generated from personal Gmail even though I've never (on purpose, anyway) used Google+
* Google+ account somehow auto-generated from professional Gmail
* YouTube channel A
* YouTube channel B
* YouTube channel somehow auto-generated to match with my professional Gmail even though I've never to my knowledge used YouTube from that account at all?
* Some weird random Google+ page that seems to have come from nowhere for no reason, but it shows up anyway if I go into Google and click "my accounts". (Possibly generated by "logging into" Chrome, which I foolishly did once? Who knows.)
And I'm terrified to even try and fix the situation because I know a single wrong click and they'll delete all my YouTube videos, or all my emails. And, natch, there's ZERO customer support for this, but why would you expect that from Google.
I'd pay $50 to get all this shit fixed back to the way it was before Google fucked it all over in the first place. Seriously. I just want separate accounts for separate email addresses and separate YouTube channels. I never wanted them consolidated in the goddamned first place.
No one who joined Facebook joined because they wanted free webmail, or a document collaboration platform, or upload and comment on funny videos with a pseudonym; so we knew what we were getting: social networking. On the other hand, most people who got started with a Google account did so because of Gmail or Docs; meanwhile Youtube was a distinct network with pseudonyms.
The Google+ push introduced real names on Youtube, and presented a cross-correlated 'Google identity' for every Google user, creating a social network where there was no user expectation of one.
Google wanted a pretty graph of humanity's friendships. So they worked really hard on making it nice to input those relationship through those pretty circles (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMZP-oyOII).
But inputting those vertices in the graph does not benefit users, and they feel that. In Facebook, it worked because Facebook had focused on the users: they wanted to be someone's friend to use Facebook's communication tools. And Facebook had a great chat system and a competent publishing platform.
G+ never had a great chat system (Hangout always felt sluggish, obtrusive and undifferentiated, unlike GTalk and Facebook Messenger) and its publishing platform was subpar (Medium came six months later, Tumblr had been around for seven years, both have a much superior editor and offer a more pleasing reading experience).
You can't beat the competition with a lesser core product.
They also had some major problems when it first launched: performance was terrible, there was absolutely no thought for spam control or collapsing duplicate shares (three people share that daily show episode = nothing else on the screen), and the web and at least the iOS app didn't allow you to push notifications so if you didn't want to get notified every time some stranger added you to a circle, you had to delete the app and learn to ignore the plus symbol on the top of every Google property. It took 6-18 months before any progress was made on any of these problems.
The real killer, though, was that as soon as the beta ended they pushed all of their users to join it, ensuring that everyone had a negative experience and were trained to avoid it. When they eventually fixed some of the problems, it was only months after everyone except for Google employees and die-hard fans had stopped using it.
One particularly bad area for this was when they forced the Google Reader community to use Google+ instead of the extremely popular Reader social network, because while that community wasn't terribly large it was heavily used and the audience ran disproportionately to journalists, bloggers, academics, and other influencers. Since Google+ offered only negatives compared to Reader's native social network (e.g. Google+ sharing in Reader didn't work on mobile browsers at all), that meant that for months the news and social coverage was skewed heavily towards complaints about how bad Google+ was.
Initially Google+ was invite only. Techie people wanted to get in. News outlets reported on it. Common people basically never had a shot at getting in until, what was it, like 5 or 6 months later? Google essentially created the largest amount of friction possible to join their new, hot, social network that everyone was talking about and then when they mostly stopped talking about it they opened it up.
Beyond the initial friction it had a surprising amount of speed bumps at the start. There were multiple times where it was simply down and they mentioned running out of storage space at least once. Google, the giant that scales everything to seemingly infinite to the common person, couldn't keep an invite only social network up.
They also didn't make it simple to get into. When you went to Google's homepage there was basically a tiny, tiny link at the top that probably a tiny fraction of people notice and that was it. It wasn't hooked into Gmail, Google's most used application. It wasn't hooked into Maps or even Google search! Even today it's still not hooked into ANY of these things to a degree in which you can interact with it.
I'm not sure who was in charge of Google+ at the time but whoever they are they either didn't understand social networking at all or they just wanted to kill Google+. I reject any other possibilities.
I really liked the way Google+ worked, too. I'm still pretty disappointed that it's essentially a failed project that Google will kill eventually.
Google fundamentally do not get social interactions, period.
General access to G+ was a month or two after initial public beta. I argue that was too soon.
Facebook, by contrast, expanded from Harvard, to other Ivys and Stanford, selective admissions colleges, and finally general public access, over 2-3 years. It somewhat followed Usenet's development in this, and I think in both cases, the selective founding cohort and acculturalisation primed both networks for larger appeal.
The thought of somehow mixing up their private life with social media is just too scary. What if the photos I take on my phone appear in my feed somewhere and I don't realize it for 3 months?
Someone I don't know added me to their circles. What the hell does that even mean? Do I now see whatever spammy crap they post? Do they see what I post? Why wasn't I asked for my permission? I've never met this person and I don't want to see their spam and I certainly don't want them seeing what I post. Who are they and what do they want? This sucks, I'm leaving.
As the sole means of creating a directed social graph, it's awful.
It means they want to see stuff you post, and/or post stuff that (if you circle them back) you will see.
>Do I now see whatever spammy crap they post?
What? No. That would be super dumb.
>Do they see what I post?
If it's public or if you post it to a circle that includes them.
>Why wasn't I asked for my permission?
Because they haven't been granted any special powers by virtue of adding you to a circle.
>I've never met this person and I don't want to see their spam and I certainly don't want them seeing what I post.
Then don't post publicly- choose a more limited audience to post to.
>Who are they and what do they want?
Go to their profile page and find out, if you care. But you probably don't- it's safe to ignore them.
This right here is where it goes from being a sane metaphor to an insane one. It's the phrase "circle them back" that has no meaning in human relationships, but is an all-important step in google plus.
I always understood the point of "circles" as how we privately define our personal world and our relationships with others, which may not necessarily be how those people view us. In comparison, I see Facebook's "lists" model less intuitive for people to understand and use.
Google doesn't do customer service well. I'll give a current example from yesterday that I posted on HN. If you go to news.google.com and search for: North Dakota Indigenous people, you will get an article from snopes.com with a totally wrong and, frankly, racist headline with a one paragraph description that reads like a hit piece on the ND governor. I submitted feedback and highlighted the article and yet its still there 24 hours later.
This horrible response to issues does tend to make people think about things.
For a very brief time G+ seemed to have a lot of potential as it looked like it could become a worthy successor to Livejournal and forums for niche interest discussion, but with a social focus. It worked rather well for photographers too.
Those weren't the directions they emphasised with their many update experiments. They give communities, but take by a design update that showed a few lines only of a long comment unless you clicked on it. Discussions became rarer and that opportunity was lost.
Most of the communicators drifted off to FB and other platforms and what seemed to remain was mainly Google fans and meme sharers. I know some persevere, but no one I actually know still uses it.
Missed opportunity sums it up rather well.