Instead, they decided that 2nd place was not enough, said "just kidding, it was actually an identity service, no, wait, a content discovery platform, yes!", and turned into... whatever it is they are doing today.
They could have been the Facebook that is not Facebook, or in Randall Munroe's words, "all I really wanted"[1]. Too bad.
The thing is, they had a chance to capture the market of early adopters, but they've lost it in the nymwars.
And I know a lot of people try to come up with all sorts of reasons for why Google+ didn't stand a chance against Facebook, ranging from UI to availability of games and the network effect, but no, Google+ appeared at a moment in time when people where nervous about their online privacy and getting tired of Facebook and Google had one chance and totally blew it with their real name policy.
But then it got worse, they forced YouTube users to migrate to a Google+ account and thus adopt the real name policy. I mean YouTube, their biggest online community. It has been a total clusterfuck and guess what, YouTube comments are still shitty, even with real names, because many people are in essence jerks and a real name policy isn't going to change that. I sometimes wonder if they were clueless about this, or knew it and did it anyway for advertising value.
But lets rewind a little and remember that they killed Google Reader because of Google+. I'll never forget them for Google Reader, I'll never trust their free offerings again.
If anything, their current attitude of backtracking from their Google+ push users-be-damned has been nothing but healthy.
But no, Youtube still has second-rate commenting.
Even a voting/ranking system closer to Reddit would be better.
But maybe they could have been. Unfortunately, their desire not to be second place meant they did all sorts of user unfriendly things in order to rope users in to using the system and boost numbers.
Abusing users' trust might work great for short term numbers, but it's bad for the long term.
But that wouldn't be sticking to their guns; from their very beginning, Google+ was overtly described as an identity service and social layer tying together Google's consumer services, with the Facebook-like social interface just one feature. (If anything, they've gone further in the direction you seem to prefer of designating G+ as a social network rather than "sticking to their guns", by taking everything that's not the Facebook-like social interface and ripping the G+ branding off of it.)
> Instead, they decided that 2nd place was not enough, said "just kidding, it was actually an identity service, no, wait, a content discovery platform, yes!"
Actually, I think what they decided is that either Facebook wasn't the existential threat to Google that motivated what was described at the time as a "bet the company" approach, or that at least, if it wasn't, that it was so more because of the cluster of services that it might expand into and which Google was better prepared to compete directly with (and often be ahead of), and not a commonly-branded suite centered around a social feed app. So both the G+ social feed app and the G+ branding applied to a bunch of other things became a lot less important in Google's strategy.
Unfortunately, "a good social network" is somewhat at odds with "maximizing ad-impressions", a problem which neither Facebook nor Google are immune to.
P.S.: What I mean is that "John Doe" and "John Doe, SDE2" and "JD12345, online gamer" should have no automatic public links between them.
People don't merely post/like things with a different audience, they interact as a different mask. Your fellow gamers shouldn't have your work-identity, coworkers shouldn't have your close-friends identity, etc.
Many great ideas get crushed under the weight of mediocrity and terrible people abusing it.
Unfortunately it is named pages or something so it sounds like something else.
Anyway, these days I just use Google+ to keep contact with a group of friends and follow Linus rants, but the circles mechanic is so muddled that I wouldn't really recommend anyone to actually use it if they want airtight separation.
Thanks for helping out here. Actually I can switch without using multiple accounts, explanation here: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/30701/how-to-swit...
I just verified it works by switching from my personal profile to my moonlight consulting company "page" that is just another profile of me and I can post, follow and add comments from it just like my main, personal profile. There is also a third, non-commercial "page" that I sometimes use (because I have a embarrassingly good taste in music : ).
> but the circles mechanic is so muddled that I wouldn't really recommend anyone to actually use it if they want airtight separation.
If I undersstand it correctly I should post family photos to a circle (since I decides who belong in what circle).
Technical stuff I post into one collection or another so people can decide for themselves if they just want to see my post on vegetables, the one on IT or both.
And stuff that needs airtight separation I only share with /dev/null ;-)
You still don't transparently switch modes in different spaces, but you can supply that.
The "change my ID by space" model, along with a non-advertising revenue plan, is Imzy. Actually, they take this one step further, in that you can opt to be anonymous (with a freshly-created, random username) in any given post (if allowed within the community). That and some other features are interesting.
The actual experience leaves a great deal to be desired, in my experience. On-demand anonymity like that does lead to a huge potential for abuse, and requires very active moderation. I found myself the subject of unceasing attacks in a thread in which the Imzy CEO and community manager were each prresent, and where the latter denied that there was a problem. One of the community leads finally came in and locked the thread -- a mail glitch had dumped all alerts to her spam folder, and activity in that profile is usually far less than what had appeared (the post is over 60% of all comments to date, over the past several months).
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...
At the end of the day this was an executive's pet project in response to what he considered an existential crisis to Googles future. While certainly motivating, that doesn't result in focused or quality services.
A "Facebook that's not Facebook" run by Duckduckgo or EFF or something like that would be useful. Run by another privacy destroying advertising company it's not very helpful, IMO.
Google had the "buzz" fail. For Facebook that seemed to be modus operandi for a while: silently make everything public as long as users didn't complain loudly enough.
And Facebook still do from time to time: just look at how they are now exploiting Whatsapp users, something I think they promised not to do when they bought it.
No idea, if it's actually true, but it seems about right, especially also with the name and that Google replaced the plus-operator in Google searches to search through Google+.