I think G+ was dead on arrival. Don't really know why that was the case but it just never made any sense. They had Orkut and killed it which kinda makes me wonder how management at Google thinks.
Single sign on made people mad, but YouTube and Google passwords being different needed to become the same. They made it look like it was a conspiracy for everyone to be on Google+. Then this tied people's real names with their YouTube content and outed some people. Just a bunch of mistakes.
Heck I think if they stayed with Waves they would have been Slack but then again ....
But, then Google redesigned Google+ into some amalgamation of Pinterest and modern Facebook, undoing nearly all of its advantages IMHO. I stopped using it shortly thereafter. I check back in periodically, but nearly everyone I've interacted with has also moved on.
It's really quite a shame.
That invite-only mode should have lasted far longer -- 3, 6, 18 months.
Work out the kinks. Especially the kinks involved in scaling the system from its earlier 18 months or so of internal-only usage, where your criticisms were read by someone with hire/fire authority over you, to a limited but public context, where not everyone is friends, you can't fire the critics, and it's not just Job, but Life that matters.
I've long noted that FB started as, literally, Harvard, and expanded gradually out over a set of selective universities over about a year and a half.
The result was to create an in group with tremendous cachet, which Facebook capitalised on for years afterward.
I'm glad to find others have realised this, including danah boyd who mentiones that specific point in several of her own research papers.
What if you're a recovering or current addict, and your support group is on a subreddit? What if you're advising people considering opiates to not follow your path, based on your own life experiences? That's not likely something you want to sign your name to.
What about domestic abuse victims who want to support each other? Victims of sexual abuse as children? Parents of children who have been abused?
What if you're into something that's would really set people off, even if it's something consensual? Consider what's happening over in Drupal-land - regardless of your opinion of Goreans, BDSM practitioners, etc., what if you're just into something that your local community or coworkers find anathema?
Reddit allows compartmentalisation of interests. G+ actively prevents that.
You can't fool the machine but at least you can hide that you like anime from your co-workers and relatives.
I know people that own like 10 Google accounts between their YouTube and other services. You can't trust Google to not expose you (like they did it with YouTube account merges, Google Plus and other instances).
It's always been tremendously underpowered, in terms of admin and moderation tools.
Large Communities rapidly became cesspits or marketing tarpits.
Small and private communities -- I had one with about 40-50 members -- were suprisingly good, though that involved a lot of attitudinal orientation and careful curation of participants, most of whom I'd come to know over several years' general discussion.
As a protocol, Waves was a great technological successor to email, IM, and collaborative document editing. It was federated, real time, asynchronous, distributed, and (IIRC) based on an unalterable event storage model. I still think that it, or something like it, will one day replace all of the proprietary platforms in use today. (That's the vision that gave it the Waves name in the first place.)
As a product it was a bit slow, being made with 2009's javascript and DOM, without React or anything like it. Even with its defects it was steadily gaining traction, when after just a year Google pulled the plug.
I still would like to know why they killed a visionary product like that, and started working on an inane, idiotic Facebook clone, that everybody could see was doomed to fail from the get go.
Also, it had a preponderous dose of "mystery meat" UI. Like a giant dose of what happened to e.g. Google Calendar on a smaller scale. There is no reason to force your users to guess and engage in a frustrating and sometimes destructive "trial and error". "Flat" and all that achieved a lousy intersection with these rollouts.
As for the underlying product and conception: It could have had legs.
I was recently off a corporate gig where one of the biggest problems was "submarining" of technical conversations in to email chains (and IM conversations) where, if you weren't included, you had no idea what was going on -- and it was DOCUMENTED NO WHERE ELSE.
Big corporation, with frequent off-boarding and on-boarding onto teams and projects. The "new guy" would invariably be distinctly clueless because they were not part of these email chains (and IM conversations). Even when they were added, they had NO ACCESS to the history unless and until someone else on the team took the time to forward old emails to them, or they lucked out being added to a long-standing email discussion chain where no-one had lopped off the attached history of cited older emails.
Wave had the opportunity to address and fix a lot of this. Add someone, and they have access to that history. Conversely, your history and conversation has access control. Instead, they blew it on a bunch of UI crap.
I've never heard whether and to what extent Wave was used internally. My understanding of Docs survival is that Google was (and still is, as far as I know) dog fooding it for its own processes. I have to assume Wave never gained that kind of internal penetration.
Anyway, as far as Google "user products", as I've said before, I draw the line at Docs (ok, Drive, or whatever you want to call it, now). Anything newer, I have no confidence it's going to be properly handled, supported, and persisted.
I still don't understand why they didn't just add a "Gmail Social" and let you build it out with your name, info, photos, etc and have that be a sort of opt-in social network straight from gmail, a bit like how hangouts is now in gmail. Instead they created this Google+ pig that makes no sense and fits in nowhere comfortably.
Also, it was bizarrely tone deaf to somehow tie youtube in this and to get these confusing prompts about merging accounts and such only to find your youtube shitposting and viewing habits now tied to your real name for any employer to find. This is a colossal mistake that I imagine will be studied in business schools for decades to come.
I read somewhere that Jobs gave Google the idea of a centralized social area for their users and considering Jobs' success rates with iCloud and other Apple initiatives on the cloud back then, it seems like they took advice from the wrong guy. Worse, Jobs might have been able to pull off some kind of Apple social network this way, but mostly because there is so much zealous fandom with Apple. Google is just a boring, unsexy service for most. They didn't realize how little liked they are. They're the barely tolerated nerds of the industry, not the popular kids. They should have just launched something easier, simpler, and more modest. Jobsian-like antics just won't work for their brand.
Google tried it, called Google Buzz. It was pretty unpopular because they forced it on every GMail user. Suddendly everyone had his name, email and account private details exposed on public readable pages indexed by Google search engine. One year later it was dead. Yet to be replaced by Google+ with almost the same shaddy tactic. No wonder it failed, people don't like such shit.
Look, they weren't going to dethrone facebook, but they didn't need to fuck up this badly. They could have gone with a more modest approach and pleased a lot of people who wanted a quick social profile in gmail in a jiffy and not a whole other service.
>Google Buzz.
Branding still matters. Google Social tells grandma whats up. Buzz, wave, etc make no sense to her.
I've always preferred both the full G+ website and the mobile app to Facebook and they were doing many of the things Facebook added shortly afterward. Granular privacy/sharing controls were much easier than anything FB had or has added since.
That said, as others have mentioned, with closed networks, you can't reproduce what Gmail did to Hotmail/Yahoo/etc 10-12 years ago. You can't just switch to a client/service because you like it better because, unlike email, it requires everyone you communicate with to also make the same switch. As long as this is the case, the only important "feature" is the existing userbase.
Google+ survives despite Google's mismanagement.