RIP. Like so many of Google’s high profile efforts (anyone remember Wave? Glass, etc), a bunch of good ideas and great tech brought down by an utter failure to understand the human element/social psychology angle.

Google+ was dead in the water from day one. You don’t beat Facebook at social by building a slightly different product with some cool ideas like Circles. Going for feature parity was a mistake. Instead they should have tried to identify a niche where Facebook was failing (say, intimate private sharing, or the antithesis of the narcissist fest) and build up a loyal core of rabidly passionate users, then slowly expanded from there. Kind of like how Facebook started out as a platform for elite universities, then high schools, then workplaces, then the world.

This approach would have been hard to sell internally at Google given the pressure to release a “Facebook killer.” But people always forget that the way to build a platform is to start by nailing a niche use case and then expanding. Even the Apple App Store only came to dominate because it was based on a hit product, the original iPhone.

Anyway, kudos to Google for finally admitting defeat. Hopefully management learned something and they hire some people who understand humans so that their brilliant engineering capacity doesn’t get wasted again.