Why Google+ Failed | Hacker News Reader

Why Google+ Failed

onezero.medium.com

308 pointsD_Guidi364 comments

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched...

From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.

Then there was the changing story of the 2011 bonus. When I hired in, we were all told our 2011 bonus would be tied to the success of Google+. That's a fantastic way to rally your co-workers, except... Once they launched Google+, the Google+ Eliterati (so to speak) changed their minds and announced that any Google+ bonus was for Google+ people alone. Maximum emotionally intelligent genius IMO. Now your own co-workers have been burned. Also not very "googly."

Finally, there was "Real Names." The week of its launch everyone I knew wanted an invite and I used up every single one of them and continued to do so as more were made available to me. Then "Real Names" happened and people stopped asking for invites overnight. That's the moment for me when the tide turned against this thing.

I really liked the initial Google+ UI personally, but the UI ran head-on into the nonsensical "Kennedy" initiative wherein some brilliant designer seemed to decide that since monitors are now twice the size they used to be, they should add twice the whitespace to show the same amount of information as on a much smaller screen. Subversives within the company took to posting nearly blank sheets of printer paper on walls with the single word "Kennedy" in a tiny font you'd only see if you got close to the things. That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how beautiful he thought the Kennedy layout was in our office for all to hear whenever they updated GMail or Search to use it.

Of course, there are other reasons beyond my tiny perspective here, but I did have a front row seat for this and it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

The "Kennedy" comment really made me giggle. I have some dislike for some trends of applications addining great amounts of white space.

I have to agree that the interface, and the "Real Names" requirements were the two biggest hurdles for me to even to start to like Google+.

I really liked the concept of circles, but whenever I did get around to using the social network, it never felt as social and engaging as Twitter. Even when I did find an intersting discussion, it was hard to keep track of replies. Reddit/HNews/Twitter have a tree-like structure for the comments, but Google+ was mostly flat, and hard to keep track of any debate.

I would lose interest on Google+ as soon as I tried to read a comment thread, and close the application altogether.

If only Google could invent a discussion site with rich text and threaded discussions … they could call it "Google Wave" …

Or even https://groups.google.com

Or Google Buzz

This reminds me of Wave. Wave team's isolationism didn't cause them to fail, but no one was inclined to help them when they struggled.

But these are symptoms. The Dark Tower was because of Vic, no? Maybe Bradley too, but mostly Vic. Vic was a virus against which Google had no immunity. "Do it my way or your career is over". Well, his direction sucked, and that's what you get when you give full trust and power to the wrong individual.

Yea but the root problem lies in Larry's management. Larry gave Vic pure dictatorial powers for Google+ without holding him accountable for real results. They gave him way too much budget, control, engineers, etc. And they waited way way way too long before kicking him out when things weren't working.

The engineering headcount was ridiculous for Google+. It was also ridiculous to have OKRs for every team at Google to integrate with Google+. Facebook (or really any company) didn't start with Mark Zuckerberg hiring a 1000 engineers and start cranking. If a VC cut him a check for $500 million after his MVP Facebook would probably be a failure. Instead he built the MVP with a few engineers and increased headcount as he increased the user base and shifted vision. Google had this mistaken notion that they could just throw more engineers at the problem and skip the whole product discovery process.

what is this 'Dark Tower' that is being mentioned?

One of the Googleplex buildings was dedicated to G+, and only G+ team was allowed entry, etc. Very different than the rest of Google at the time, which was a proudly-open culture.

> From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone

I work in an IT MSP where we do business with lots of small-medium companies, and i am astounded at how much the leadership sets the culture for the company. A sarcastic and passive aggressive CEO will have a company of rude employees. An outgoing confident type A person will work with friendly extroverts.

Separating a team like this guarantees a different culture than the rest of Google, and imherent resentment between the two.

> how much the leadership sets the culture for the company.

Over the years this is exactly what I experienced. And even if there are a bunch of employees and middle managers that are pushing for a different culture, for the benefit of the company (this can happen in a fast growing company where things haven't settled down yet), it is an uphill battle for those people, and they will eventually leave.

"That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how "

I've never worked at Google but am friends with many Googlers. Someone I know was one of these awful company man manager who worked there would just keep defending G+ with these awful spoon fed comments. I stopped bothering trying to say anything about it since it became obvious that the group think has set. He's doing great at Google these days from what I can tell from his LinkedIn profile. I guess the culture has really changed if those are the Googlers who get promoted.

It's not surprising the biggest innovations comes from people who leave Google instead of coming from the ones who stay there.

I have people on facebook who work at Tesla, and “spoonfed” is a great description for some on their arguments about autopilot etc

Thanks for the insight on this from an internal point of view.

I've been trying to figure out how Google transitioned from being viewed as having the moral high ground over most other public companies, tech and otherwise, to the sad state it is in today. Based on everything I've read to this point, my best guess has been dysfunctional management. What you describe sounds like basic blunders rather than any sort of mistake due to complexity or bad luck.

Too many MBAs in management who've been told they're world changers because of where their degree is from.

The classic business management book The Innovator's Dilemma specifically recommends moving groups working on potentially disruptive new products into separate facilities. That helps them avoid distractions and makes it harder for "corporate antibodies" to kill the new initiative. Most people think that the IBM PC project succeeded in creating a microcomputer that disrupted the mainframe and minicomputer markets at least partly because they had a separate office in Boca Raton instead of at HQ in Armonk.

http://claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/

Of course having a separate facility doesn't guarantee success, and can certainly cause other problems if poorly managed.

The classic of this is the Lockheed Skunkworks. It's success has never been repeated - lots of companies try to create a skunkworks clone, but try to fix it, and wind up thereby breaking it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

Google+ would never be disruptive to Google. It is in a completely different market from anything else, it wouldn't have to destroy any other Google project to succeed.

I had to look up what the "Kennedy" initiative was.

It was redesign of all Google products to get a unified look [1]. The lead designer, Jon Wiley, named it Kennedy as a reference to Larry Page's Moonshot Strategy [2]. [3] compares the redesign mockups (in blue) against how the products looked before.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h...

[2]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/ff-qa-larry-page/

[3]: https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2058367/googleredesign_10...

On 3, are you sure? The blue-shaded image search results is what it looked like a long time ago.

Kennedy Initiative was done in 2013.

>Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then.

Thanks for providing a great insight. I kept away from Google+ due to it's initial aggressiveness of opting in and linking it across other services. There was already a growing disillusionment around investing time and effort into various concepts, which ended up getting culled[1]. It was Google Reader, which made me realise not to take any Google service for granted or rely on them long-term and only use them in a disposable format.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

Reader was the shot that killed any trust in Google's service for me as well... Today it's mostly my gmail account that is mostly bulk mail, fallback search when ddg fails me, and maps on my phone. And even the gmail I've been contemplating how to best get away from it.

Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.

Something about this rings true.

it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

From my POV, the Google+ launch was doomed by the way it was foisted on Google users. Because of that, my feelings of cynicism towards the product started in less than a second.

Plus one. For everything you said.

I hated Google plus for how open they forced everyone on it to be. VS Facebook was private in its beginning.

I hated Google plus because they forced all of their services to begin to rely on it. They forced various logins to use it.

I have stopped using play store comments and YouTube for this very reason.

Had they split Google plus into parts where people adopted it slowly they would have fared better. Parts like friend network-1, forum network-2, news network-3, share page-4, posts page-5, etc.

I still remember when they replaced Facebook and Twitter search results with GOOGLE plus results.

And the bonuses part is why this makes so much sense about why they did it.

Tahrir Square in 2011 was the high water mark for a lot of tech. It was the time when we all thought that SV really really was going to change the world for the better this time, no for real reals.

After the Arab spring turned into winter, a lot of the air went out of the tech balloon. It never was really the same. Cynicism crept in along with the MBAs and the Generals.

Blaming the failure of Google+ on "they had their own cafeteria that we weren't allowed to go to" and "they got bonuses we didn't get" seems really really inside baseball.

Shows the problems inside Google, yes. But that's not why it never really took off.

I took `oneshot908 as saying that the Google+ team had a broadly isolationist attitude. Their distance from both co-workers / potential internal contributors and customers/users was a reflection of this and that trickled down into poor product decisions.

Yes, you got it. I made up the "Dark Tower" remark because they sat the Google+ team on the top floor of the only semi-highrise on the main Mountain View campus. This separated them both literally and figuratively from the rest of the Googlers and in 2011, that was just not "googly." And yes, this was a Vic Gundotra move.

I love a good skunkworks project. But Google+ needed Google to succeed. Apparently Vic felt otherwise and the rest is history, no?

I doubt it. There's just no connection between them at all. Think about all the bad things you read about Amazon - how Bozo treats people, how employees are treated, especially the warehouse staff, plus a website the HTML hairdressers love to hate on. It's still the first choice for retail and cloud services for millions of people around the world. Separate cafeteria! I love Hacker News!

I worked at a place that did this - separate team for the new project with their own eating area - and the amount of goodwill it blew was amazing. People who'd worked together for years became resentful of each other. It created a "we know best" attitude in the new team, who then spent months playing with cool tech and failed to launch. They were months late by the time I left.

It's a fine line to walk to carve out a team to "move fast and break things."

It can be valuable in an org that has gotten bogged down with process that is often in place for good reason, or that needs to focus on longer-term things.

But when you do carve out that team, extra care needs to be spent figuring out how to integrate their efforts and culture with existing teams they need to interface with at various points. Likewise, it really needs to be positioned as a benefit for everyone.

Saw the same thing happen.

Conway's law. If you fuck up the org of a project, the project will be just as fucked up. For something that is supposed to integrate across google products, it should never be so isolated.

Problems inside Google's and a disconnect from the reality of the company could very well be why they never really took off.

That's how they treated developers too, though. For Facebook, they give you an API where you can post generic things. For updating my apps to Google Plus, I found they forced you to only use certain verbs, and ignored requests to add more. So they just felt they knew better than the third party developers and ended up making their platform difficult to post from apps (games, tools, etc.).

I hate responding to anecdata with anecdata, but my experience is that Real Names was a HUGE DEAL in a very small and specific sector of the internet (some of which has clear overlap with HN), and an absolute non-story in the rest of the world. I worked at G at that time also, and while I agree that Real Names was a dumb decision, at the time I did not see any direct impact on interest or engagement from my friends because of it, aside from the small pocket who we truly incensed. While the incensed group was extremely loud, they were also a tiny, tiny minority, and I don't think we should mistake their volume level as an indicator of quantity.

For me, the real names debacle was a wake up call that too much of my online life depended on Google. What if using a new product caused my email to disappear without any recourse? What if Google subscribed me for something I didn't need or care for, then wiped out my digital life because of it?

I was interested in google+, but it wasn't worth the risk. This was also the point where I stopped playing with new Google stuff, and started logging in only for email, and logging out.

Now there is no way for Google to know all this, so I assume I got classified under the 'no big deal' group in your analysis.

Realnames stopped influencers who didn't use their Realnames from signing up.

If you didn't have contact with either marginalised groups who as a matter of survival didn't use their real name or ancient extremely online people who for the entirety of their internet experience had been known as a handle it wouldn't have crossed your radar.

But it was a huge thing.

The irony here is that no one in this comment chain is using their real name, which proves the point that there are indeed chilling effects on speech when you could be punished for a simple difference of opinion. Real names is what made me drop g+. If I want to publish something as me, I don't want another platform controlling that for me. I absolutely concur with your comment that for the people this was big for, it was huge. For the rest of the population there was no compelling reason to switch.

G+ sometimes resembles the way Mozilla develops Firefox: Lots of aspects make just a small group unhappy. However, taken together all of those unhappy groups mean that you have no early adopters left and the project fails to get traction.

>small pocket who we truly incensed. While the incensed group was extremely loud, they were also a tiny, tiny minority

Thing is, that small group is your grassroots, influencer base without which you fail to thrive. G+ never got beyond the starter 'tech nerds' blogger type adoption and out into mainstream headspace.

You don't have to bow to that crowd to succeed, but at the very least you have to avoid annoying them away from your offering.

What about as an indicator of impact?

I think the worst problem was the terrible UI.

For example I remember how odd the two column layout looked. I'm not sure anyone has studied this, but it seemed obvious to me from the first day it was a huge mistake.

It seems like a small thing but I think there is a reason everyone (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is using a single narrow column to feed content to the scrolling user. My hypothesis is that it takes less cognitive effort to parse.

It was obvious. Vic even promised "oh just you wait, we have great plans for that space", followed by years of nothing.

But surely vicg wouldn't tell a lie?!

> Kennedy

Glad to finally know that cancer actually has a name. Kennedy made me stop using Google Reader and the GMail web UI.

> the biggest problem was getting their own super-healthy cafeteria

That's a really bizarre position to take. Every other thing you mentioned sounds a lot more impactful than that.

Psychology. When companies make moves to mark groups and projects as different in some way, it's not really that important what the mechanism is. It could be something objectively cheap and superficial, but still end up being a critical factor in moral and dynamics.

> I was an IC6 at Google

IC6 meaning... ?

I think it means Individual Contributor (level) 6 - which is described as "Staff SWE" by https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engi...

Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority.

Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.

The GP is providing their personal insider view regarding what they perceived as mismanagement of G+, and is starting of with describing the vantage the had at the time. There are many (many) instances of appeal-to-authority on HN, but this is just plain `ol context.

Apologies if I read too much into your comment, but Appeal to Authority is a name of a logical fallacy and ascribes some sort of intellectual failure to the poster, when there's clearly none.

I don't see it as an appeal to authority but rather as context.

There's quite a bit of context shift as you go up the ladder within an organization. The reason "why" something happened often looks very different from different perspectives.

A tangent, but a true "appeal to authority" would be using the fact that someone is an expert on a subject as the evidence for the assertions. I don't think merely mentioning that you or your source is an expert of a subject is necessarily an appeal to authority falacy.

In this case they provide their opinion and then provide the reasons and evidence for their reasoning.

It's not an "appeal to authority", it's a qualification to speak on the subject. I used to work at Microsoft, but why would you care about my guess as to the internal workings of the Google+ team?

Here is my version of a post mortem:

Google plus interface was modern but clunky at the time. It was a Facebook clone with just a cleaner implementation. The RealName policy wasn't as big of a deal as a loud group make it out to be. The circles, though sounds good on paper, wasn't enough of a differentiator. Maintaining them takes time and is work which only a few do. Finally, internal politics perhaps also stopped the team from iterating fast enough to the feedback.

Well Facebook got circles like functionality in no time. They knew the relationships, cities, schools, jobs.

Basically Facebook got to be Google+ parity faster than other way around.

Same thing with Snapchat. Instagram and WhatsApp replicated more of Snapchat than the other way around. Insta won. WhatsApp won. They are growing even though main FB.com is stagnant.

How is brain separate from the rest of google?

Isn't it funny that people still don't use a messenger with decent filters, which assess personal ratings of posters to show you more relevant results first? Even Discourse doesn't have personal blacklists. Though its search is more advanced than Reddit's. Isn't that strange in 2019?

I find it ironic that the author is trying to detail core reasons why Google+ failed when they themselves admit they don't use any social media.

While I didn't work on the Google plus team (I was on a different team), the biggest reason in my mind why Google+ failed was motivation. Not a single Google executive on the team had a strong reason for why they should build Google+ besides "we can make a better version of Facebook". There was no real use case.

Facebook, at the time, however had engineers and product managers who were intensely driven and hungry; they were in a fight for their existence against some of the biggest companies in the world. If they failed their company would fail, and they were hugely passionate about what they were doing. For Googlers, it was largely a theoretical intellectual experiment. Tons of Googlers on Emerald Sea didn't even use any of the social media tools and they didn't get "social". To them it was some thing you plug on top of an existing product to increase ad revenue.

If you don't have the drive and you don't understand your users, you aren't going to build something people want.

Very cliché, but reminds me a lot of Simon Sinek's famous TED talk about "Start with the why", Facebook was driven by its mission, Google was driven by market share.

OTOH same can't be said about Snap vs Facebook, Facebook simply copying many of Snapchat's features is working out pretty well for them.

That's my thought as well. Google+ seemed like just another "me too" platform. Though Google attempted to steer it into another direction later but it was simply too late by then.

What I found hard to believe was that with all the brightest, smartest, most creative people at Google, yet they couldn't figure out a better use case for the platform during all those years? That should have been easy compared to other much harder problems that Google were able to solve successfully.

Similarly, if we think about it Yelp really has no rights to be in the small business index/listing/reviews space. Google own two biggest weapons in "Search Engine" and "Maps" and they completely dominate these two markets, so why was Yelp allowed to get to where it is today I'll never understand?

I don't know why they still have not done this but if they really want to, Google could easily leverage these two tools plus Google Cloud Platform to turn Google main search page into a Global Store where end users could simply enter a product name into the search box and Google will immediately locate it on Google Maps at various stores near where they are with real time stock availability. Users then can quickly go and pick up the item they want in person at the location they prefer. They don't even have to wait for shipping.

Google could develop an easy and intuitive front-end app for small businesses to list their products and update their stock (or use some kinds of tracking technology like beacon), then tie more advanced machine learning and big data analytics features to their Google Cloud Platform for bigger companies that have the needs for such data.

This helps reducing much friction and shorten the purchase funnel for end users who are searching to buy a specific product. At the moment, users must navigate through a sea of websites of which are mostly irrelevant, even after finding a potential website users again must find their way around the store to see whether it even carries or has the product in stock. Can't find the right product or zero stock availability? Well too bad, start again from scratch!

By reducing these steps, Google can effectively help users save much of their time and quickly locate the product they want right on Google Maps. People do not really care about vendors or companies, they only care about the products as that’s really what they’re looking for. Small businesses will also benefit greatly from features like this one since they won’t have to spend more time and money to locate buyers, now buyers just come to them directly.

Google Search + Maps have just become a global retail store overnight.

>They don't even have to wait for shipping

I don't mind to wait for shipping. In the next two weeks is ok. I don't even search on Google. I search on Amazon. Btw, what is Yelp?

Amazon don't work in all countries. And the ability to walk in a retail nearby to look at the product you want is valuable too.

I think most of the damage from the "real names" policy came from the their sudden and draconian enforcement of it at exactly the wrong time. Just when the service was starting to build momentum, they initiated an effort to find and punish anyone who'd previously signed up with anything that didn't look like a "real name", in many cases locking them out of their entire Google account.

And then shortly after that, having learned nothing, they started hunting down and banning accounts that appeared to be for businesses, since their "Google+ for business" offering wasn't ready yet. By the time it was, nobody wanted to put their business on Google+ anymore.

Finally, after it was already dead (but they didn't seem to know it), they subverted the rest of their business to try to drive users to it - mandatory Google+ account integration, killing any product that tended to compete with it, etc.

Google+ is the demarcation between the old Google that consistently did amazing things and the new Google that, well, mostly doesn't.

One of the worst things to come from this Google+ thing was the removal of the "+" for searching on Google itself. You used to be able to use " +go +lang " and get results that were guaranteed to have those two terms on the page. Now you have to use double quotes and other tricks. sigh

On the plus side, Google at least tells you when it omits words and offers to put them back in now. Not that it does much good. Something about Google the search engine changed and now it's impossible to get good results for anything but the most obvious queries. I tried looking up why every commercial pot pie says to let it sit for 5 minutes.

I looked this up years ago and got blog posts explaining it. All I get now is page after page of recipes for homemade pot pies. You'd think after a while some logic would spin up to say "I bet this isn't what they're looking for! Let's try something else." It used to do that.

I remember when Youtube comments were tanks and stickmen.

Maybe the + doesn't mean what we thought it meant.

Google + Evil

I’d prefer we reserve evil for things that actually hurt people out of malice, not poor product design. Otherwise that term becomes useless.

While talking about the designs of villains is a bit out of scope of the original topic, I find the best bad guys are those who are evil not out of some concept of general malice but instead pursuing some perhaps even agreeable goal with poor implementation and disregard for the harms caused.

While not as bad as some companies (Pinterest), it does seem they're headed in a direction where wrong-think will get your videos pulled, your entire channel demonetized or worse. Kind of evil.

This is in reference to the fact that the motto of Google used to be: Don't Be Evil.

I think a lot of it came down to their "invite-only" launch. I remember a lot of my friends were excited to try it. Some of us were able to get invites, some weren't. Eventually the people who couldn't get on right away just said "screw it" and went back to Facebook. The rest of us followed because that's where we could interact with everyone and not just the people who happened to get on Google+.

By the time it opened up to everyone, nobody cared anymore. I can't believe somebody thought it would be a good idea to restrict access to a product that depends on network effects to succeed.

Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. I know a few friend were hopeful that Google+ meant they would no longer see posts from their racist uncle or gullible aunt. Start out with that same kind of exclusivity and hopefully it builds this exclusive mystique so when you open it up to everybody you get a flood. Perhaps the big difference they didn't factor in is FB did this when relatively few people were on social media so they couldn't help but grow whereas Google+ needed to recognize they were trying to enter an already saturated market.

Facebook had what turned out to be an accidentally brilliant way of bootstrapping networks and trust.

Fundamental problem: social networks with no-one on them are not fun and not sticky.

Fundamental problem 2: if anyone can read what you're writing, it's not a social network, it's a blog. So you can't just let anyone see what people are writing.

The way FB handled that in the early days was that by default, people in the same university network could see your status etc. I don't remember exactly what they could and couldn't do but the point is that they created a semi-privileged circle of people with some access based on a pre-made group that people would be familiar with - fellow students at the same university.

That gave people a network from day 1 in what felt like a controlled way. Also, as noted, they started with a desirable closed group that people wanted to belong to.

Facebook started out as a social network where you could get what we today regard as PII (e.g phone numbers of the opposite gender and such) for Harvard students, and its engagement numbers were really good (based on Zuck’s previous experience with the Harvard-only FaceMash).

They would later expand to other Ivy league schools — aka networks — one by one, rather than simultaneously, as a way to slow their growth.

I imagine an unintended side effect of this growth strategy was the sense of FOMO that it engendered among university students that had heard about but couldn’t join the exclusive/elusive Facebook, unlike the other social networks like Friendster, Hi5 etc.

For each network on their expansion list, Zuck & team would furiously scrape the student directory to seed the new network with plausible student info.

> Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up.

It wasn't just that. At the beginning, you had to be at an Ivy League. And that was the problem, G+ was invite only among a bunch of nerds, whereas FB was invite only among people who network for a living.

Problem is even though Facebook was restricted to a very small set of people, each of them could interact with most/all of the people they wanted to (other college students). Same was not true for Google+, people didn't have enough invites to give to all of their friends.

It's an exclusivity play, to pump up demand. People like things that make them feel exclusive, so for launch someone at Google tried to increase demand by making G+ more exclusive with invite-only.

Unfortunately this increased the barrier to entry at launch too, which for social networks whose value is tied to users generating media is a cardinal sin.

I think they did that because of how well it worked for GMail. And Facebook was restricted too in the beginning. Obviously, Google+ didn't benefit from following the precedents set by other successful launches.

Gmail's invite only approach made sense because in 2004 it was absurd for anybody to offer 1GB of free storage. Hotmail offered 200MB I think.

Compared to that, nobody cared about a Facebook ripoff with a different UI and none of the network effects.

I think it was way less than that. Wasn't it like ... 2MB?

True. My grandma was in fb early.. She never even knew what Google+ was. Its only a social network if there are ppl on.

Gmail could send and receive emails outside gmail.

FB wasn't restricted within your likely friends group (all students at particular schools were made eligible at the same time).

GMail's time was different, there was a lot less competition among web services back then.

At the time Gmail launched there were a bunch of mail services.

No, the difference with Gmail is that email doesn't require a network effect to be useful. If I'm the only one on G+, it is pointless. If I'm the only one on Gmail, it's just as useful as if everyone I know is on Gmail.

The main reason Google launches popular products by invitation only is to manage server load. Otherwise you get situations like the Pokemon Go launch, where the service was unreliable for the first few months.

Pokémon Go was mostly fine. I didn’t play it beyond a few months. Nor did most people I know.

Pokemon Go was an absolute nightmare at least for a few months.

Unreliable because too many people want to use it is the goal :)

This is a frequently-repeated view, but I find it completely implausible.

A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal.

That might be compelling content, compelling connections, or a mix of the two. A cultivated and exclusive club, as with the Haevard Facebook, or early Usenet, has appeal. It's the opening up to the world which kills that initial growth appeal.

Google+ would have done far better to extend the beta period, possibly by years, and shake out its fundamental architectural flaws.

> I find it completely implausible.

I disagree and think it's 100% the reason it failed.

> A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal.

But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't. And since a social network is only useful if all your friends are on it, people never got into the habit of using it. Why use a social network without your friends? It's not like GMail where it's still useful even if your friends aren't on it.

I can tell you personally that I was excited to get the invite to Google+, only to lose the excitement when only 3 of my friends were on it. By the time Google+ became available to everyone, it was too late. The excitement was gone.

> A cultivated and exclusive club, as with the Haevard Facebook, or early Usenet, has appeal.

The exclusivity of Harvard Facebook succeeded because social media was still in its infancy at the time. Most people didn't have access to the WWW in their pocket yet. Early Usenet had appeal because the Internet itself was still only being used by techies and college students.

> The excitement was gone.

Most people didn't hear about it. You can ask people on the street. They sure know facebook. Excitement is not a good way to motivate people to move platforms, in general (despite the niche cases like Fyre Festival which are relatively small). Maybe they should have gotten some celebrity support? Otherwise the excitement wasn't mainstream. G+ needed mainstream users.

> But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't

That doesnt explain the lack of participation a year later. Nobody wanted G+ because they didn't need it. Even if it gave some benefit (which it couldn't) it didn't join with their existing Social Media data making a higher barrier.

The thing with Harvard Facebook is that it's a predefined social circle that came online as a unit. If you go to Harvard, most of your friends and people you regularly interact with are also going to Harvard, so you have a cohesive group altogether.

With Google+, invites were more or less random, so in a group of 5 friends maybe 3 got one and 2 didn't. Were the 3 people who got invites supposed to just drop their other 2 friends? Obviously people aren't going to do that.

People do like things that are exclusive, but they want to exclude outsiders, not their friends.

The early G+ was similar in regards to early Slashdot or Reddit: Tech / SV insiders, Googlers and Xooglers and their extended notworks.

Expanding beyond this, especially to Google's other natural affinity group, advertisers and marketers, did far more harm than good to the service IMO.

The actual invite-only period only lasted a few months -- it was general-access by late September 2011:

https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/tech/web/google-plus-public/i...

Facebook's closed period lasted years.

The ranking system did kind of annoy me. We used G+ heavily inside of Google, and lots of interesting people posted interesting things. As time wore on, I felt like I got less and less of that stuff. A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link. I followed them. They followed me. The post had 300 +1s. But I could never see it.

The other thing I thought maybe killed G+ was the "ghost town" effect. Instead of forcing everyone to share everything publicly, people would just share with their close circles. So to an outside observer, it looked like a ghost town, but to the people using it, it seemed perfect.

In the end, I miss it. The people I interacted with on G+ were great. I met some people on the Internet that are now real-life friends. I could always post a random idea or a project I was working on and get feedback. Now I have nothing. Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are. Facebook seems dead (I never used it). Blogging sites like Medium seem evil. So I just share random things with random friends on Discord. It's sad. G+ could have done so well.

I guess it's a fair post-mortem for G+ the product, but I'm personally more interested in what happens to content on G+. For example, Linus Torvalds blogged on it (eg. dead link https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY... about why he switched away from Suse), and many others as well. The content is why I occasionally went there, and why people outside Google posted there (assuming a big name won't let them down); certainly not a generic group chat/mail site.

We're being told on https://plus.google.com/ that [Google] are in the process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts and Google+ pages. but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?

> Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are.

I restarted my Twitter, and just started following people who post things in interested in that are not politics -- for me, that's maker spaces, education, STEM, etc -- and it's night and day. A much smaller group of people who post interesting things, ask questions, interact, and are generally friendly.

> Twitter seems like it's a place where people shout into the void about how far to the left or right they are.

There's a lot more to Twitter than that. Just don't follow anyone who posts that junk (even if they're real-life friends/acquaintances) and it's actually a pretty nice place to be. If you post interesting stuff and interact with others, you'll gain some followers and be able to have a real conversation, which you will then want to take elsewhere because of the fucking character limit.

Medium is disagreeable, but there are many blogging sites still around, and people still follow them.

A good example is Syonyk's Project Blog (https://syonyk.blogspot.com/). It's hosted on Blogspot, and despite being relatively recent - started in 2015, long past the peak of blogging - he already has over 2.3 million views (total), just writing interesting detailed logs of his tech and home projects.

> Instead of forcing everyone to share everything publicly, people would just share with their close circles.

This is an interesting point.

At the time G+ came out a lot of people were complaining about how you really didn't have control of your content on FB and G+ really tried to create an ecosystem where you had some control of your own content, which ironically what people wanted, but it never really took off.

I also remember some other social media platforms like Diaspora doing the same thing. Even now, I know of a few platforms that are taking a blockchain (decentralized) approach to social media. I think its still way too early to tell if people will use those in great numbers, but I think its the next natural step.

Maybe G+ was ahead of its time??

I agree their content surfacing / organization was terrible. You couldn’t just find content from Person; hell, you couldn’t find your own. You literally had to google work-arounds on how to find the set of your -own- posts. Talk about alienating people from your product.

Not that I'm particularly fond of it, but how is Medium evil in a way that G+ was not?

"A coworker would say "did you see so and so's G+ post" and I would go look for it and not be able to find it until I begged someone a link."

This is why I quickly quit using Facebook after only starting recently. Well, this and the way I cannot repeatably re-find a post after seeing it once.

Why is Facebook dead? I use it quite often.

totally agree... (as a non google person.. just a normal user)

The problem with Google+ is that using it felt like work.

It had some nice ideas, and was in many ways better than Facebook. But it wasn't fun, and it wasn't somewhere that was pleasant to hang out for long.

It also felt like it was solving a problem for Google, but not for its users. I could see how it would be strategic for Google to counter Facebook, and how tying searches into my social graph would result in much better data for advertisers. But I couldn't see how exactly that benefited me.

Also the launch strategy of making it invite-only was daft. I was really excited to get an invite just after launch, until I realised that no-one I knew had an account and there was hardly anyone else to talk to. Never really went back.

They learned the wrong lesson from the Gmail invites. The artificial scarcity of Gmail invites worked better than their wildest dreams. People were selling invites on eBay, trading then, etc. It worked really well to generate buzz. So of course they tried to replicate it. But if you're the only Gmail user among your friends, you can still email them. As you say, if you're the only Google+ user, you have no one to talk to.

I really think the author missed this social point, and it's an extremely important one. As a tech nerd, I had fellow tech nerds who had G+ but I was unable to secure an invite, like many others. It was just frustrating and caused people to develop an anti-G+ attitude before they could even get onto the service.

I distinctly recall a wave (lasted about... 2 weeks?) of serious internet hype where many contacts on Facebook saying they wanted to get on G+ to try and and get away from FB, yet could not get an account due to this rollout methodology. It's my personal opinion this was the shot they missed - you don't keep away the early adopters who will bring in their non-tech friends over time.

Speaking of wave, Google wave too. Really excellent idea, but if you couldn't collaborate with anyone but yourself (because of invites), you aren't really "collaborating" and all the benefits of wave are lost.

In addition to that Gmail at the beginning was a really outstanding offering so people accepted the waiting time. It offered a massively better web interface than practically everyone else and really a lot of storage space. It took other free offerings years to catch up.

The invite strategy did work somewhat while they launched Orkut I think. The major difference this time was that FB was already well established, so artificially restricting access, meant people just ignored it and continued to use FB.

The problem with Google+ is that using it felt like work.

I pretty much stopped using it early on when I realized organizing everyone into the various "circles" was a huge undertaking. At the time you HAD to put people into circles and I had a lot of people from Twitter to import.. so I gave up and just didn't use it.

I actually liked that part -- I could share things with friends, but not family/relatives, or vice versa.

But I wasn't trying to do force Twitter into circles -- just network with close friends.

I like the idea, but the practice of categorizing so many people seemed intimidating and I couldn't be bothered to do it. So I stuck with the alternatives.

The "Non-organic growth" section covers Google+'s biggest sin for me. They unilaterally created G+ profiles for everybody with a Gmail account with no prior warning, and with no opt out.

Because of this, my Gmail contacts could see the comments I'd made on Youtube videos because it was front and center of their G+ profile page, which I recall popping up when you logged into Gmail. Prior to this, there would have been no organic way for them to discover my comments other than randomly coming across a video I'd watched and commented on.

Now, I don't post anything objectionable on YT comments (it is attached to my primary Gmail after all), but I wanted to keep my YT experience separate from people on my Gmail list. G+ took that away in one fell swoop.

This was the moment that I ditched Gmail and made my first vanity domain for email. I have a few Gmail accounts now, but they are separated: one for Maps, one for YouTube, etc. I don't use any of them for actual email.

The decision to name it "Google+" was an epic blunder. You wouldn't ask a girl at a club if she's on "McDonalds+". You wouldn't ask a member of your church if they'd like to connect on "American Airlines Plus".

When Facebook was at the height of its coolness (like 2007, 2008), most people didn't even see it as a corporation. It was just its own independent thing. It never would have spread if it were attached at the hip to some corporation that had nothing to do with connecting to friends.

>Project Hancock was the internal code name of the project designed to do this. It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user. This is actually much more complicated than it sounds; it took a team of engineers somewhere around three months to accomplish it.

What this bit glosses over is the PR disaster that was Google forcing Google+ down the throats of its unwilling users. For example, for years they required Youtube users to consent to the creation of a Google+ profile in order to comment or message other users. I took that as a personal affront and not only refused to consent but installed an extension written specifically to block Google's constant, full-screen begging that blocked even passive Youtube usage.

When I pulled all my Google data with their personal download tool a few months ago, there was no section for Google+. I consider that a hard-won badge of honor.

>It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user.

Oh god. Thanks to this dreadful decision I went from not giving a crap about G+ to actually despising it and wanting it to fail miserably.

I had a youtube account long before Google took over and now all my activity was being posted on my G+ account feed or something. Now I had to turn that off.

Thanks for letting everybody know that I liked some videos Barney the Dinosaur because I let my sister use my PC, Google.

> I took that as a personal affront

You're not the only one, and I wonder how much that feeling contributed to the failure of Google+. Because the harder Google tried to shove it down my throat, the more I resented it and swore to myself that I wouldn't touch it.

Yep. It also happened around the same time when they ditched Reader. I never used Reader and don't care too much personally, but it seems they angered a small but vocal community that felt they were sacrificed for Google+.

This along with the forced YouTube integration were particularly egregious. Then there was the bit where they started forcing people to use real names. Overall they showed zero respect for their users and people deserted them accordingly.

I probably would have been interested at some point had I started using it by my own initiative, but I got forced into Google+ by this project.

I didn't understand what it was (a bare bones Facebook clone? ), didn't have friends who used it and I can't remember if I saw no content or just only irrelevant content. I gave it maybe 15 minutes and never came back.

And I actually considered myself an interested user, at the time I used Facebook but hated it and still saw Google as a force for good.

This, Google was shoving the Hancock down to every Google user.

It didn't just die by itself. Google Talk was killed with Google+ too. It was a functional, no-nonsense IM that just worked and worked everywhere. After they engulfed this into Google+, it just became a bloated monstrosity that no one could understand. Remember when it suggested you every Google+ user when you tried to type a friend's name in Hangouts? Yeah... that was pretty fucked up.

I am just amazed that Youtube didn't die with it after it was used as a gateway to Google+.

Google Talk was fantastic. The desktop experience was great, and the mobile apps were flawless, even on Nokia Symbian and Blackberry 6 OS.

It's the only Google product that felt fun to use. I haven't bothered with Hangouts, Allo, Duo or any of the stuff that followed it.

> This, Google was shoving the Hancock down to every Google user.

My brain read that as "down every Google user's throat", and I got an idea why they decided to name it that.

That's what you get when some team's bonus depends on conversion rate.

While I do (mostly) agree with this article, it fails to mention the #1 reason why I never used it. I couldn't post something on someone else's page. I could post something to my "feed" and they could happen to see it. But I couldn't post something into their "feed" (wall, timeline) where all their friends could see it and then comment on it.

It was more like Twitter than Facebook. Maybe I'm wrong, but too me they were marketing "Twitter with pictures" as "Facebook", and they fell short.

Indeed it was more like Twitter. Yet it was better than Twitter because it didn't have the severe post length limit and it would let you create channels (both private and open) for specific selection of people you invite to discuss a particular subject.

> it fails to mention the #1 reason why I never used it

In fact, that was mentioned:

> Of course, Facebook’s news feed has many of the same design elements that I have described here, including ranking. However, important messages sent directly from one person to another have their own dedicated channel that works more like email, with strictly chronological ordering rather than ranking and with an explicit “mark as read” function. Ranking and algorithms are only used for nonessential postings.

Though I suppose it's ambiguous whether he means someone's Wall/Activity Log or Messenger, I suppose, but I read it as the former.

I never understood why you would want to do that. I also never see people do that on Facebook, is it an American thing?

Well Happy Birthday wishes is the big one.

Other times there's like maybe an inside joke or a picture or an anecdote that you think that their friends would enjoy more than your friends.

It's used way more by younger people, though.

I feel dumb for saying it, but I didn't understand "circles".

I think I actually did but I found it a bit confusing and assumed I didn't understand.

Actually generally I didn't understand what Google thought the workflow for Google+ was "supposed to be." This actually is something I find hard to understand about a lot of their products. There will be a heartwarming video, or some announcment showing a gee wiz feature ... but I'm not sure how they think I should use their product(s).

I loved the look, but I didn't really get what I was supposed to be doing and how things worked.

It felt to me like an engineers social network where I was supposed to invest time to understand it like any other engineering type tool.... that's not what I want from a product like that.

I understood circles. I spent two hours carefully categorizing everyone I added into the perfect Venn diagram.

And then I realized that this was bonkers, and that I never wanted to do it again.

Ya I never used it but assumed that was their way of trying to be Facebook LinkedIn and Twitter all at once. Problem being the world already had those services and by being separated the circle management is done for you.

Yeah it seemed like you could put a lot of work into managing your circles ... and it wasn't apparent that you would get get nothing out of it until you did it.

Kind of funny that among other things, nobody at Google realized that most married couples would never want to have to go through making their wedding reception seating chart again.

Turns out "engineered social interactions" is indeed an oxymoron. Also, Google's work structure where most product leads don't have dedicated tech teams but instead have to win over tech groups to work on their projects result in too much technocracy and too little empathy in projects like this. Can't say I feels sorry for them though. Google masqueraded itself as an idealistic company and a champion of the internet but consistently kept undermining the free web in pursuit of money. It's a great business model and they made a huge commercial success. But the "do no evil" bullshit and the cult-like attitude of googlers is just pathetic.

Google is 'famously bottom up' as you mention. Problem I see here is that they tried to combine bottom-up, with the top-down edict of "We want to kill Facebook"

From Google Search onwards, I find/try the product, I like it, it evolves and improves (I presume after some A/B testing somewhere). e.g. gMail is 'web based email client', but was first I know of to let you tag, import from other accounts - and now has the tabs, unsubscribe buttons etc. When some changes (such as the tabs) first arrive, I feel a bit uncomfortable, but you get used to them.. then appreciate them.. and I build up a buffer of trust for the next change that might come.

G+ didn't spring into existence because of customer demand. It appeared because google decided google needed it. We didn't create accounts because they looked useful, they were created to try to get google's network running quickly. We had features pulled on other google products, to push us towards using the damn thing. e.g. I suspect removing latitude from maps wasn't a decision from the maps team to improve their product.

It’s “don’t be evil”, not “do no evil”. There’s a subtle but important difference.

> It’s “don’t be evil”, not “do no evil”. There’s a subtle but important difference.

So, too, the difference between "don't be evil" and "be good."

Really? How does one distinguish being from doing in that sense? Scoring actions on an evilness scale and taking an average?

Not being evil is achievable; most people achieve it. Doing no evil is impossible, even if you tie bells to your pants to avoid accidentally stepping on bugs.

Do as much evil as you want, just remember to rationalize it somehow!

The non-organic growth was more than 'just creating me an account' - there seemed to be a fair amount of "stick" to help me move.

My beloved Google Reader got killed and the latitude feature in my Google Maps was pulled with an explicit 'if you want this feature use Google+'

When I turned up at Google+ for the first time I was in a foul mood and was just there for my missing features - which were now missing/worse.

The idea of being able to create 'groups' was fine in theory - but bit of a mess in reality. Can't remember the exact details as it's gone - but my impression was being forced to use a poxy UI widget, for something better suited to a spreadsheet. My learning though, was that maybe I didn't 'trust' the separation. On Facebook, LinkedIn, random forum - you don't consider each post and choose the audience.

Point above was exacerbated by the god-awful way information was displayed back to you. Seemed to vary between ghost-town bleakness and semi-random information-vomit, sprayed over your screen.

I have to disagree with the author. Google+ did not fail. Had it been a startup rather than a Google project, it would have been considered an amazing success. The problem was that the goal of being a Facebook killer was just too ambitious. Had it instead been a social feature amongst Google products it might have served valuable purpose for both Google and its users. Sadly, in a large corporation, every project has to meet some IRR hurdle, even if not explicitly. And at Google that hurdle was artificially high and Google+ could not meet it. This is why Alphabet makes so much sense, as it allows risk levels to be segregated.

But all its success came from strong-arming people into using it, using the leverage Google had with all its other products. So it makes zero sense to compare it to a startup.

That's not where all its success came from. That's the one downfall the article got right. It was successful before that. Trying to shoehorn a bunch of people who didn't want to use it into using it was the mistake. It was doing just fine before that and it would have continued to grow organically. It was never going to be a Facebook replacement though. It was better than that.

"90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds."

By most actual metrics, Google+ was a failure. 90% of people went there "accidentally". They were trying to do something useful, travel to somewhere useful on the Internet, and clicking the plus.google.com link was a mistake!

90%!

Did it make a dime? If it didn't, I doubt that it would be considered an amazing success.

Realnames. It was entirely Realnames on launch.

Realnames Realnames Realnames.

Realnames stopped people joining just at a point where Facebook was being incredibly shitty.

Real names AND the instant account lock with no hope of reversal if your name failed the opaque real name check. I lost access to a gmail account and everything associated with it because g+ didn't like my name. Account totally locked. Gone. Forever.

Reading about other people being locked out of their Gmail account (with no recourse) was exactly what prevented me from even trying Google+.

For me, it's gone further: reading about other people being locked out of their gmail account with no recourse, because of that real names policy, is the reason I've never logged into Youtube (since, as far as I understood, to log into Youtube you had to have a Google+ account). I still watch videos, but never while logged into gmail (and as a consequence, I've never commented on any Youtube video, or posted any videos I might have recorded).

I think Google+ failed first and foremost because there wasn't any reason to switch.

First, it didn't make sense that people would quickly leave an established network (FB) to join a new empty network. At this time, most folks who wanted to join a network had finally joined FB. It took a lot of time and momentum for FB to reach that point. Google+ didn't offer anything fundamentally different from Facebook: it was very similar, just with far fewer people to talk to.

Second, Google+ wasn't cool. Most successful non-niche social networks seem to grow from young people first: young people enjoy having an online space that's separate from older friends/family. Then, as the network becomes more popular, older folks join. This is loosely the trend we've seen with Facebook and Instagram, and to a lesser extent with Snapchat and MySpace. But, to get young people to join, you have to offer something cool and/or unique. Google+ wasn't very cool or unique: it seemed to target everyone at all once.

G+ failed for other reasons too of course, which others have listed in the comments here. But I think the biggest reason it failed was because there wasn't any compelling reason to use the network.

(I'm a Googler, but my opinions are my own)

> there wasn't any reason to switch.

And a big reason not to switch: the big feature that Facebook has which Google could not possibly replicate is that it's not the same company that has control over all the data I type into the web search box. It's bad enough how much data my web search of choice gets, it's bad enough how much data my social media network of choice gets, but combined it would be worse than the sum of its parts.

It's incredibly easy to be data-conscious when all you have to to is not take active action to migrate from Facebook to Google and I believe that many people who would never lift a finger to control their data are still more than willing to factor data into their decisions if it's not inconveniencing them. Similar problems are faced by Bing and Alexa, why would I want to invite Microsoft or Amazon even deeper into my life than they already are?

Oddly enough kids are using GDocs for messaging in school and during study sessions, etc. Not something to build a network around since they are used as ephemeral ad hoc chat spaces.

GDocs gets used because it's not blocked/censored by the school's IT.

This is a classic case of smart people jumping head-first into a problem with only a superficial understanding of what makes something successful.

I've seen this in mobile games over and over again - people who were successful in AAA games would start a company and raise a bunch of money and say "We're going to FIX mobile gaming!" And then they would fail spectacularly because their mental model of the problem didn't accurately reflect reality.

Google has repeatedly blown chances to build social platforms because they seem to believe that every problem can be solved via scale. OpenSocial is another prime example: They built a platform, brought in social networks, were able to say that they had X many millions of users and thus had achieved massive success... but it was a terrible API that was difficult to work with and offered far less functionality than the Facebook platform it was meant to compete with. I'd love to see some commentary from someone who worked on that, but my impression was that they didn't understand that the FB platform's extreme ease of use and developer-friendliness was what made it work well, and that the platform's scale was a value-add on top of that.

> My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot.

Like what? I'm in my 20s-- I haven't used Facebook in 10 years and I have never once had the feeling from my interactions with other people that I had missed out on something.

Are you in school or training? And/or do you work with members of your social circle? And/or does family live close? If any of these are true, I can see how Facebook offers little value.

But the older you get, the fewer people you tend to have around. My social life is easily 30 times harder to maintain now than it was when I was in college. Work was also an easy place to find friends and kindred spirits. At first. But now, more and more, my coworkers are younger than me and even if we enjoy each other’s company there is simply less and less we have in common.

Family starts dying off, or gradually moves over time to where everyone is scattered across the globe. Same with friends. Or they get married, have kids, get busy with careers, etc.

New friends and family enter ones life of course, but they come fewer and farther between, and never feel quite as deep as those early life relationships.

Many other platforms offer a way to stay connected, of course. But many of them are either too superficial to feel worthwhile, or have too few people on them, or have too much friction to be consistently used.

I agree most of what is on Facebook is rather irrelevant, and I basically ignore 99% of what people post. But for those of us whose social lives have been scattered to the wind, nothing else out there comes close to Facebook’s utility.

I don't have Facebook, and all of these needs for connectivity are taken care of by WhatsApp group chats, essentially. It feels far more intimate and immediate than Facebook ever did too.

I've been out of high school for 20 years now, but a high school friend reached out to me on Facebook and let me know he and his wife were going to be in town for the weekend. We went out with them a few times and had a blast!

He then let me know that another high school friend of mine had just moved a few miles away from me (I live thousands of miles away from where I went to high school, so this was news to me.) I went to her housewarming party--invited through Facebook--and now she and I have reconnected too.

I am in several Facebook groups for our industry (cell phone repair) and it's how I've made friends, learned about new developments in our industry, and found vendors who are awesome.

I am by no means a huge Facebook fan; the article yesterday about how they treat their outsourced content moderation teams was appalling. However, I acknowledge its utility for both business and personal uses.

I'm in my 30s and have kids and no time, I don't see my friends very often because they are also in the same boat.

So yeah, Facebook is a good place for me to keep up with people.

Can confirm

As a parent, one kid is involved with a theater group that organizes shows through facebook. School parents tend to communicate through facebook too. Of smaller significance, my regular poker game organizes games over facebook too.

All that added up to me begrudgingly returning to facebook.

For example: I was invited to an event this week, and to participate, I need to RSVP on the Facebook event... I could ask how to get around that, but I'm actually not that interested. The point is, the process has put a roadblock in my participation.

But to be honest, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.

Think of it as a useful filter. If the event isn't important enough to actually invite you in person, it probably isn't worth bothering with.

My whole extended family all use Facebook to post notes and pictures of kids and cousins, ask questions, say hi, and plan events. I have a clear feeling I would miss out on something if I refused to use the product.

What, you say? They don't have to use Facebook to do that? Of course they don't. But they do, and I can't fix that. Your cohort seemingly doesn't, or the members that do aren't members you care about.

That's what network effects are all about. "Facebook" isn't a product or a feature list in this context, it's a community. They have it, Google didn't, and that's what the linked article is about.

I have this same problem. I solve it by calling them or texting them and asking for updates.

The key element of why Google+ failed is deeper than these arguments.

The key reason is because Google didn't do any 'human' testing before release.

They should have picked a school or town or even a small country and released it just for those people.

If it didn't work there (IE. See sustained growth till it had most of the market share), they should have changed the product, tested in a new town, etc.

As OP points out, without data, you can't make good decisions, and most decisions in a social product can't be retroactively changed. Even Facebook did staged school-by-school rollouts to refine their model before going fully public. Doing anything else is doomed to fail.

They tested it on Googlers. However, that's an atypical audience and more testing with a different group would have helped.

They tested it on Googlers, and we were extremely vocal about the things we didn't like, but were ignored by the higher ups (read: Vic), using the argument you mention - "oh, but you're not the typical users".

Your own employees barely count as users.

Google Plus failed because of the following reasons:

1) Invite Only It makes sense for gmail to be invite only, as you can still connect to non gmail users. Its email. It doesn't make sense to make Google Plus invite only. You are just limiting the growth of your product. It was dumb.

2) Circles Circles were good and bad. Circle are groups. Groups are what everyone now uses on WhatsApp, but WhatsApp is optimized for PRIVATE communication, while Google Plus was a SOCIAL network. So, when I made awesome posts and shared with my circles, those who were not in circles, saw my boring empty profile and moved on. What is there were others interested in my Lego and Arduino cirles? They wouldn't be able to know about my lego and arduino posts, and they wouldn't be able to get themselves added to my lego and arduino circles (they tried to rectify this later on by some other feature, but it was too late by then).

3) Real Name Why try to go this route? I just didn't understand. Maybe requirements from higher-higher up?

4) Slow UI While the UI looked good, I am not sure how good of an experience was it. It was definetly SLOW.

All they had to do was to make a facebook clone. Then slowly polish it.

As an outside observer: Real Name was a play at true identity management. There are two true identity managers currently out there: LinkedIn for business, and Facebook for personal.

No other sites have a larger penetration of "socially validated" / "web of trust" connected with real names, pictures, and some kinds of "social/semi-public" activity.

Twitter, Yahoo, etc. have tons of "CoolPerson5583" but correspondingly fewer "true identities" with mutual friends, interaction between members, etc (counter-examples welcome!).

This correspondingly increases the value of "true identity" accounts. 100 twitter accounts could be 100 robots all following each other. 100 facebook accounts tied to pretty much any "real-ish" person pretty regularly will get you ~100 real people on the back-end.

I'm aware of certain people who may have 2-3 semi-active "alternate" facebook accounts (ie: friends-only v. semi-professional, friends-only v. business-related, friends-only v. alternate-group/identity), but facebook accounts are "more important" than twitter accounts because of the _value_ of the social proof/social connections between "real people" vs. "anonymous speech" or "anonymous acquaintances".

A facebook account with very few people in your social circle "vouching for it" would rightfully be greeted with suspicion. A facebook account is very difficult to "take over", as with a sufficient number of connections, your identity in facebook is directly related to who you're connected to in your social network. (these statement also apply to LinkedIn).

You simply _cannot_ create/recreate a new facebook or linkedin account in the same way you can create a new twitter account or spotify account. People _KNOW_ you on linkedin/facebook, and even if you "rotate" your account, you'd just end up in the same "slot" in the social network.

However on twitter, if I were to make "userfoo123" and "userbar456", those two users could have wildly different personalities/actions/social-circles, etc much more easily than having two accounts on facebook or to accounts on linkedin.

GMail/email accounts are sometimes another proxy for "real identity" b/c they are often associated with a particular individual, contain materially sensitive information, and are kindof rough to re-create in case you wanted to change your identity (logins/password resets, etc.).

However, gmail/email accounts are much more prone to personal identity management and not _social_ identity management (ie: you log into your bank account w/ your gmail address, but you don't usually directly post cat-memes with your gmail address).

Identity management is a tricky thing. They didn't want to be what twitter turned in to... they wanted to be "the white pages / phone book" and steal that job from Facebook/LinkedIn.

I will agree with the author that FB isn't invulnerable, but IMO Google+ simply wasn't compelling or different enough by that point for people to move over from FB. The problem was the Google+ tried to be a better FB than FB. There just wasn't anything substantially better from the user's perspective to encourage a shift enmasse.

This isn't so much Google+'s failure as a product as it was the astounding success of FB at keeping it's users. Google+ definitely had some cool and interesting features, but people just didn't care. I think a great case study would be to see why MySpace failed to keep it's users and FB got them, and why Google+ couldn't achieve the same critical mass.

I think the eventual fracturing of the features of Google+ and migration into other products was a smart move.

Here's an example conversation I had at the time with someone about why we should switch over to Google+:

Me: It's better! Cool features

Friend: Ya but w/e FB already has everyone there...plus those features are meh

Me: Ya but privacy!

Friend: Let's be real, Google and FB make money the same way...ain't no one's privacy gonna get in the way of that

Me: True...

The reason why I never used it is because it tied my gmail address to the Google+ account, and it forced a Real Name policy. I didn't like how dictatorial it was, and with Facebook around, there was no need to have to bow to Google and follow those rules. So I refused to sign up.

There was zero sense of privacy and they tried to shove that down my throat, and I vomited it out of my system.

Worst part is they refused to keep and improve the parts that actually worked well.

I wrote about this a while ago and submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515513

> Google plus had circles

The problem was it relied on people self-categorizing their own content.

So just some person in the reddit web design circle thinks sharing their dogs or kids photos is fine and at that point G+ was worthless to me. IT's just subreddits without the moderation.

No, Circles required users to self-categorise other people's content.

Leading to the inevitable "you're holding it wrong" accusations agaist the poster that they weren't posting correctly.

Collections, a late feature addition, helped this markedly.

Instagram is very unidirectional. So is wechat (the instagram-like feature within China).

The whole "influencer" phenomenon (originating in the Chinese KOL - Key Opinion Leaders - phenomenon) is specifically engineered to be a unidirectional mechanism.

In fact, Snapchat tried to do the same with "Discover", which ended up in Google Plus territory. It was not very usable.

I don't think it's important whether Google+ failed or whether Facebook declines or not.

The fundamental failure is by computer science or the IETF that there is no open standard for federated social networking. Some might say social networking is out of scope for academic research. But why was SMTP not out of scope when it was invented?

The is an open standard for messaging (XMPP). That didn't prevent Google and Facebook from starting on XMPP and then closing it off.

There is ActivityPub (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub) but it's unlikely that any of the big parties is going to adopt it.

> Some might say social networking is out of scope for academic research.

And you wouldn't even say that at this point, with the open-access movement and academics trying to think of alternative ways to do peer review and curation openly.

It failed because the point was to unify the privacy policy of all Google services (which means data collection would be less spreaded out across the different Google services). The Google+ front (the product users used) was more an excuse for people to sign up and agree to the terms. It had some interesting ideas but was never on the path of success after the initial goal was completed.

Googel+ was by far the best social network I've ever seen, the only one I've got addicted to and the only one I've actually written posts to. All Google had to do with it was adding youtube-like recommendations (many people complained it was "empty" while I had a waterfall of great content in it just because I actually subscribed to everybody I could discover, to those they were subscribed to etc) and leave it as it was without introducing more and more complicated concepts.

Almost all of my posts on G+ were autoposted from my blog. This was true for most of the people I followed as well. It was just another checkbox for promoting content hosted elsewhere. Interaction occurred in comments on my blog or on Facebook but almost never in G+.

Nah dawg, Google+ failed because it didn't try to do any of the things that people who desired a different kind of social space might have wanted but couldn't get on Facebook at the time, perhaps things like anonymous accounts, private groups that didn't transitively leak information, or a space for collaboration on Google Docs. In other words, it made zero innovation over the incumbent, except for "circles", which was ill conceived.

What do you mean transitivelu leak information? It was possible to set up a community that only members could read. And once the nymwars where won you could get pysdonymious accounts.

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Computer networking in general and social apps in particular are still young, in civilization's history. We are still figuring this out. Maybe in a hundred years we will have a good grasp of what works. If the writer is right, then Google Plus's lack of traction was from the interaction among several subtle ingredients.

Yes, even Facebook's "successful" model is kind of a failure because it encourages people to spam all their friends and relatives with crappy memes.

It seems like a better model should somehow encourage people to think about their audience and post what they would appreciate.

So similar to IRC. As much as I hate their desktop client, Discord is actually ticking all the right boxes for what I want out of social media. Ironically one of these things: broadcasting specific things to specific groups, is something G+ tried to do. If I see an interesting paper, I don't want to share that on FB and have my grandmother making confused comments. But I do have a discord channel w/ some college friends where something like that is appreciated.

At the same time, most of them aren't gamers, so gaming content is on a different channel. I don't even regularly use discord for their VOIP chat (arguably the reason they caught on), but unfortunately it is just easier to use for non-technical people than IRC.

One thing I don't see mentioned too much is just how slow it was. Not to mention confusing. I expect a lot of people were simply put off from using it after taking a look.

I'm not a social person, so maybe I wasn't a target audience of Google+, but for all its flaws I actually loved asymmetrical following model. That means I can "follow" a friend of college friend whom I might have met twice, just because they say something interesting, without wondering "Wait do I still count as their friend? What if they remember me and I really don't? It's gonna be awkward..."

Similarly these kind-of-friends can follow me because they find me interesting and I'll feel no pressure to follow them back. Half of the time I get a friend request in Facebook, I don't really know the person (but I have reasons to expect that the person thinks they "know" me) so it feels awkward either to accept or decline.

Just my two cents.

I am completely convinced the problem was the invite-only launch, as others have said; let me explain why I think this:

Facebook used its invite-only (campus-only, .edu only) natural to build status.

However, a college campus is a dense subgraph of the overall human social network. People in college are socially interacting with mostly other people in their college.

Google+ was invite only, but the invites were not clustered in the network. The subgraph induced by the invites were a fairly random slice through the overall human social network. Not actually random, there were dense subgraphs of Google employees, and of certain tech communities in there. And indeed, within these subgraphs G+ got some traction.

But most early users joined and found none of the people they wanted to communicate with could get on. I viscerally remember being in this position as a user. You sent invites to your friends, and you waited. In the meantime, you went back to Facebook.

This makes almost everyones' first use experience suck. A B2C product where everyones first use experience sucks is dead on arrival.

I remember discussing this at the time. It seemed like madness to me. (I was doing a PhD studying social graphs.)

My first tweet on twitter, from 2010, is about Google Buzz (a preceding social product): https://twitter.com/fergal_reid/status/8974231887 "No beta to build up hype for Buzz. They realised that social apps that need a critical mass of users have to happen all at once."

When it turned out they had not in fact realized this for Google+ I was dumbfounded. I still believe this one decision likely cost Google tens of billions of dollars. Many many users would have preferred G+ to work - I'm reminded of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/918/

I would love to hear the inside story here and learn how this was actually weighed up, or that I was wrong.

I was there at Google when G+ launched. I think there were a few other initial issues that prevented it from landing:

1. The real name policy was draconian. Leadership didn’t listen to internal or external outcries for far too long.

2. The team leaned into “circles” and a strange permission model even over usability. E.g. rather than posting to someone’s wall, you posted to your own and set the viewing permission to that person.

3. Circles were frankly a chore to manage.

4. The network was seeded with too homogenous a network. Google employees were given first access and then could invite two people. The result was a network that was too highly concentrated with tech bros at official launch.

G+ worked pretty well. I took shared family photos, a few thoughts, news, interesting stuff I found, got comments, etc. It did what I wanted.

However, it didn't do what Google wanted. It didn't capture my attention for hours and get me to engage with all kinds of corporate marketing and ads. It didn't teach Google anything about me (to be used to sell me stuff later) that it didn't already know.

We know with social media, we are the product, not the customer. So Google+ didn't fail, we failed. I was a great customer of G+, but I guess I wasn't a very good product.

Too late to the party and no compelling reason to switch for normal people.

Late? It launched the same year as Instagram and Snapchat.

It was a different product from a photograph app. It was a product more similar to Facebook / Twitter.

I think G+ failed because of design system. The effect of auto popup when you hover the + button is annoying, at least to me.

The overall design is "circle", which i think is annoying for most of people, too.

http://archive.is/cytZl

G+ failed by not understanding Facebook and by not having any intention of giving disgruntled Facebook users what they wanted.

My sense is Facebook in particular brought as many people "online" as did all the previous Internet innovations combined.

Essentially, it did this by giving the functionality of previous online communication approaches while minimizing the noise and merging these together into a "real" relationship called "friend". (Facebook didn't do more than email, blogs and chat, it did less but in a way that people wanted).

Online data can easily form a stream of bits and bytes each person puts together into a different form. This stream only becomes "a thing", a "document", etc when some group of people all perceive it the same way. Facebook made "friends", "posts" and so-forth into "things".

Just as much, human relationships have always had a tension between social-contextual identities and universal identities, between "real" identities and assumed identities. Facebook did a decent job of balancing all of these in that worked for a given individual and that worked for the-person-relating-to-the-given individual. Facebook's privacy model was broken and inherently broken but it still was key to Facebook's success because it's what people want, what human social interactions assume - ie, you can tell your friends things and they'll remain "secret". It's not true in the real world and it's not true on Facebook but it's what people to believe.

And yeah, G+ failed by not understanding any of this. I don't know exactly how many people understood this then aside from Facebook.

I think there's another angle to the feedback loop: they pushed everyone in the world into Google+ with no thought about notification quality or even how to handle abuse. Most of the notifications — which were displayed on every Google property — were noise (“<rando> who asked about your Craigslist post 10 years ago just joined Google+!”, “Someone you never heard of added you to their ‘open source’ circle”) and it took months before there was a way for those not to generate push notifications in the iOS app.

By the time they started doing basic UX work most people I knew had already either uninstalled it or been trained to ignore it.

Killing Google Reader was a similarly poorly-considered move: they forced people to leave a system which had frequent high-quality interactions into something which was the exact opposite, and didn't even do basic QA testing on mobile for several months. Since Reader was disproportionately popular with people like journalists, the family go-to IT people, etc. the first impression many people got was “don't bother”.

I think what they should have done is add functionality into Chrome that would allow and encourage you to automatically import all the data in your Facebook account into Google+ and then post to both accounts.

At the time, Google had much more goodwill than today and there's a chance people would have used it just so they could use Google instead of Facebook.

Trying to use your dominance in one space (search, or browsers, say) to actively steal data from a competitor (scrape Facebook!) with the intention to destroy that competitor is something lawyers have wet dreams about.

I mean, Facebook would have destroyed them in court.

I think it would have been important enough for Google to be worth fighting no matter the cost, since it would have been the only viable way of replacing Facebook.

The user would be consenting, initiating and running the procedure on his own machine, so there's a plausible argument that it's fine.

Regarding the antitrust argument, you could also argue that Facebook is a monopoly in social networks and that preventing such a data transfer is anticompetitive.

It's a real problem that Facebook users don't have a way to download their own Facebook data.

People opted into other social media platforms. G+ forced it on you one day. I think many people resented that.

How about asking the other question: what made anyone think it would succeed?

Facebook was already dominant and Google+ offered nothing really compelling besides a half baked circles/groups thing that took forever to manage.

Google had no special social insight, just big-company confidence and a lot of engineers and dollars.

Google+ leadership was not trying to build a product and grow a userbase.

They were concerned about driving metrics, and only tangentially building a product.

As if you could shove a half baked social product down on enough peoples throat by inorganic means, then hope that the network effect will do most of the work for you.

What blew it for me was the way it automatically added gmail contacts to your circles. I started seeing posts from an auto dealer I got in a trivial dispute with years prior over e-mail. Why Google thought I wanted that is unbeknownst to me.

I had a hell of a great time on G+. Almost all of my current internet friends are from there. I had great chats with many interesting people, like David Brin. Really if you were part of the "engaged users" group, it was fantastic.

They lost me on the "real names" fiasco

Honest question, how much would it really cost to just keep it going? Vs killing the service, even if not investing in growing it? It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform.

You can't fire and forget a service at Google, promo-driven churn in the tech stack will break it sooner or later. So you have to staff every service for indefinite maintenance, or kill it in an orderly way. This is also what happened to Reader.

So now our key internet services last about as long as the average team tenure. We really need open standards so we can rely on the internet as the infrastructure, not some cloud provider. Google will die one day like other services. One has to wonder about the fate of all the artifacts people entrust to it: they will be erased just like every time before.

It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform.

I think that sort of thinking is partly why it failed. Google+ was a great idea for Google but presented very little benefit to the user over what they'd get on any other social platform. Unless there's compelling reason why then users aren't going to invest time and effort in using a product, and they're going to be annoyed if they're forced to.

Actually, I still miss Google+. It was one of the few places I could have meaningful conversation about topics.

Google+ enticed extended circle of group to interact with my posts. I feel Facebook is really about getting confined to their own bubble; even when such posts are marked 'pubilc' I rarely see anyone outside of my group interacting with me.

I guess the closest major one right now is Twitter. Google+ was certainly hitting some sweetspot between Twitter and Facebook for me.

"But the thought of someone coming along and making a new social network, one that doesn’t have Facebook’s flaws, seems hopeless. After all, if Google, with all its vast wealth and talent, couldn’t do it, then who could?"

Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat... The greater issue to me doesn't seem to be who can beat Facebook but rather, what's going to keep Facebook from buying up any real threat that's not backed by one of the big 5 tech giants.

Restricting the launch to an arbitrary subset of people made no sense. I wasn’t going to create “circles” if only 4% of the people I wanted in the circle had accounts. I wasn’t going to create events that could only invite 1/3 of the people. I wasn’t going to “share” things if I thought only one person would see the post.

Then there was the bridging. They ruined every service owned by Google by shoehorning direct links to Google+.

To me the name sucked, google+ is equivalent to more Google. It doesn't really make sense why they choose that name, seems lazy and boring...

Also from what I can remember, the main features were its integration with all Google services and never really did anything interesting, so it was kind of a boring platform that no one wanted to join (I don't remember anyone being excited about it in my social network)...

My biggest qualms with G+ was that it was constantly changing...

I would log in every few weeks/months and something was different.

G+: Hey, check out this new feature!

Me: But I uhhh...

G+: Oh, and we implemented this too, isn't it great!?

Me: Well sure but...

G+: And we removed that one feature that you did actually kind of use, it's now this.

Me: I just wanted to use your service for 5 minutes right now, not learn about how great it was. And now my 5 minutes is up.

G+ was pivoting to a fault since day 1 imho.

Perhaps a better approach would be a protocol that allows for complex integrations to be built by the power users, but a simple product for the masses. Twitter before they shut off their API.

Imagine one of these social networks actually had APIs for you to manage contacts, group them, control publishing and consumption, etc. Most people wouldn't interact that way, but the power users would.

I remember that my wife and I were late to Facebook, having been convinced by our daughter's babysitter that it made staying in touch with people easier. We built out a Friends list and were having a great time reconnecting with people from our childhood. When Google+ came on our radar the idea of trying to rebuild connections in another platform was not appealing.

The killer for me was that I thought the "circles" I created were mine. I didn't realize, and assume Google wanted me not to realize, that the people I put in circles could see each other.

Once I did know I then put everyone in their own circle, probably not what Google+ was hoping for but by then I distrusted the entire system.

No business plan, no vision, lack of leadership, tried to copy Twitter and Facebook. Even Yahoo 360 was better.

Circles was a nice feature, which however was promptly matched by Facebook. You can't win on features in this market.

A few Google+ communities I was part of were good, probably benefitted from being small and focused. Compared to Facebook groups, the ability to select sub-topics within the community made it easy to navigate.

These days, I'm reluctant to use any free Google product, their lifetime is uncertain

I read the initial white paper on circles before Google+ ever existed; I was super excited that they seemed to grok human relationships in a way FB never did. But the actual product disappointed me and I never could quite articulate why.

(I can’t find the link right now but will update when I do)

For what it's worth, regarding the asymmetric interactions, if my memory serves me right, it seemed to be Google+ that made Facebook introduce the notion of "Following" people. They were a good idea, just not a substitute for symmetric relationships.

The interest graphs gathered in the several years G+ was online should be valuable to Google still. I wish G+ was still around, although I could get a GSuites account and still use Google+. Most likely there are not a lot of users anymore.

My experience of Google plus was following HN circle or sth only to have birthdays of a lot of people I don't know littering my calendar. I never bothered to clean it up. I think they are no longer there.

The OP has obviously never used Instagram, which for my generation is much more popular than Facebook. Almost every reason listed for Google+'s failure, is a feature of instagrams massive success.

Google+ implementation was also particularly bad. With plenty of bugs in the frontend. Like it was a pain to use and wasn't pleasant to look at. And no one understood what a circle is.

Why did they end it? Was it losing money?

In some ways it seemed superior to the other giants, plus it was tied to most peoples' google accounts.

Why didnt they just add advertisements, paid posts, and clean up the ui?

Talin! I was always a bit amused that people like him, who wrote The Faery Tale Adventure, Music-X or the Amiga Installer, would work on a social network. Same with Andy Hertzfeld.

Come on, it's Google. They would have killed it someday anyway. Had it lived longer, there would only be more angry users that wouldn't have got their data out.

Will they kill Gmail or YouTube in the future as well in your opinion?

Killing Gmail was probably on the roadmap when Wave was introduced.

Didn't fail, they got a global login to all their systems.

Google+ was a ghost town because every google user had an account but nobody used it so it felt strange being on there and not seeing any activity.

Google’s consumer branding makes a lot more sense if you replace “Google” with “Smurf”.

Smurf+, Smurf Assistant, "Hey Smurf...", Smurf Home Hub...

Google+ failed, but it begat Google Photos which is not a failure.

obDisclosure: I'm a Googler, but joined way after G+ both launched and failed.

from what i read, they tried to brute force the proyect, google+ was esentially an startup and they didnt followed the startup way

Google+ did not fail. * They shaped it to be news feed from the beginning * They used it to develop social networking feed * They used it to develop news feed * They implemented both in YouTube and Google News app.

If they would just fiddle with YouTube they might get into trouble but now they've tested everything they needed and rolled it to other products. Google+ was never meant to be Facebook replacement.

The only thing that ever gave it legitimacy to me was the fact that Linus would write posts there.

Two things in my opinion:

* Made it hard to "post something on someone's wall"

* Terrible redesign after redesign

"And when the execs are extremely smart people making 10 times the salary you do, there’s a tendency to give them the benefit of the doubt. Surely they must know what they are doing."

If you think vicg made only 10x an L5 salary then I have bad news for you.

One day I'd like to hear the real reason he left.

From the consumer perspective, Google+ failed because it sucked.

It died because Facebook was better. As simple as that.

Medium is unreadable on mobiles.

When Facebook will fail?

Not anytime soon. Tech folks understand the privacy and ethical implications. Good luck explaining that to the layperson.

In many developing countries, FB is how many, if not most people get all their news and interact with family and friends.

Can't take that away. Because there's no real alternative to it.

Google engineer Steve Yegge said:

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

The full Yegge rant is at: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

While I agree with much of what Yegge said in the post, I think it's extremely far fetched to say that Google+ failed because it was lacking an API when there are 50 other more likely reasons you could point to. Forget understanding platforms, at the time Google fundamentally didn't understand social.

The saying 'camel is a horse made by a committee' applies to this situation. There was almost certainly no base creative drive when creating the actual product. Most things that end up being good are driven by someone who is viewed as somewhat crazy but has enough power or force to get what they want and/or steam roll others.

Not to mention I am sure they are confusing smarts with luck. The decision makers think of themselves as where they are because they are really smart and less lucky and opportunistic.

Social networks, like space launches, are complex systems, with many failure paths and few leading to success. Unlike sppace launches, there can also only be a single leading platform in a winner-take-all regime, making success far less likely than in rocket engineering.

G+ failed for multiple reasons, despite being successful in numerous particulars. I miss it, though I don't regret its passing.

As with other criticisms, this one is on point in noting that the failures were of leadership (and all the way up the stack: Bradley, Vic, Larry, Eric), and architectural.

Site mechanics (good points by Talin), unreliable messaging, and the "let's cram this down everyone's throats" elements all left a very bitter taste.

What Talin omits in particular (though it's alluded to briefly) was the extent to which Google directly fought many of Google+'s biggest enthusiasts, with #nymwars (the Real Names policy), noted, being only one of the most notable instances.

I'll also distinguish G+ fans from Google fanbois -- the latter were (and remain) toxic to the company. Thos includes many (though not all) of Google's annointed "TCs" (top contributors), many represented among the G+ Google+ Help community, where active frustration of efforts to help users and groups migrate off G+ in its final months and days was a constant factor.

Another element creating tremendous distrust was Google's repeated ridiculous statements as to the site's success, openly mocked in the press. In early 2015 I proved by a random sampling of profiles that a minuscule fraction of the billions of registered profiles were posting publicly on a monthly basis, methods and results confirmed several months later, on a far larger sample, by Stone Temple Consulting:

https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...

Later 2018/2019 analysis of G+ Communities further cemented these findings. This also showed the huge value of regularly contributed, fresh, relevant content to success, over raw subscriber counts. Post recency was a far bigger prediction of other engagement (comments, +1s, reshares) than subscribers.

See:

https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...

That Google, a notoriously metrics-driven firm, could not or would not credibly analyze or report such data was a huge blow to its general credibility.

I always thought the name had something to do with it, "google plus" doesn't sound right specially for a social network, also "Hangouts" is a terrible name, it doesn't internationalize well nor does it work for an enterprise setting, and "keep" is a good app but it should be called "google notes" nevermind they already used that name on a now defunct product.

Google has been worse at naming products than they have a right to be.

Feels like the same people responsible for Mircrosoft's product decisions in the 2000s have now all moved to Google, with a slight twist in strategy.

When a Microsoft product didn't do well they called it something different and relaunched, hoping no-one realised it was the same old thing – e.g. Zune Music/Xbox Music/MSN Music/Groove Music/Microsoft Store etc.

Google now* just kills it and launches something else, sometimes more than one, hoping no-one remembers the still-cooling corpse of the previous attempt. For example, they're now on their ninth attempt [0] at a messaging service with no end in sight.

*Google Now is also dead.

[0]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-ninth-attempt...

I don't mind the killing off of stuff that doesn't catches on it's a mark of dynamism.

Is there a list of Google services somewhere? I'm always astonished at how I only hear of SOO many of their services only in their obituary.

They changed Keep's name a few times, I don't think they are done. When I pull the app drawer in my phone I always wonder where will things be in a couple of months. Some apps have Google prefix, some don't. Some had, but now they don't. When they have the prefix, I can see only bunch of icons with the same label "Google...". It seems that now they are at no-Google-prefix phase, but I expect to see it changed a couple of times.

Keep naming history went somewhere like this: Keep, Google Keep, Notatki Keep (Notatki for Notes in Polish). So I had to relearn a couple of times where they were.

Chromecast app had it even worse, because at one time it merged or became Home. Of course it had it's Google-prefix phase AFAIR. It probably went something like this: Chromecast, Google Cast, Google Home, Home.

Completely agreed. It's because the name sounds like it's referring to the company instead of a product.

I'm happy to use Gmail, which comes across as its own thing, but I might be a little bit more reluctant to use Google mail. I'm happy to use YouTube, but Google YouTube? I don't know.

Internet companies' names tend to refer to their flagship product, and become synonymous with it. But when they release other things with their name in front of it, like Google plus, it just sounds corporate.

> I'm happy to use YouTube, but Google YouTube? I don't know.

Sure we do: Google Video was a competitor to YouTube that few used. Then they bought YouTube, and eventually killed Google Video.

"Hangouts" might not sound enterprisy, but that hasn't prevented "Slack" from doing well there.

> Google has been worse at naming products than they have a right to be.

Driven by engineers and not creatives. And even if you have creatives driving the product (naming or otherwise) it still won't make sense to the engineers who are the final deciders. [1]

[1] I don't mean there are engineers but that the base people who are in power come from or think like engineers vs. creatives. (Think Walt Disney vs. Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates).

Agreed. TBH Google+ should be named Hangout, lol. And Hangout should be Google Chat (or similar).

I am sorry for the off topic comment but I can't even read this article because medium now shows me a "Sign up for an extra read" popup without any way of closing it. Medium is going so down the tubes, it's become impossible for me to read anything there. Does anyone have a way to bypass the sign up pop up?

https://makemediumreadable.com/

I got around it by requesting desktop version. Markup on Medium clearly fails for mobile Firefox.

I use the Firefox extension "Hide fixed elements", which is not only useful for hiding these kinds of modals but also overlarge headers and cookie warnings.

I don't think there's any way around that pop up on a mobile browser.

search for the extension "make medium readable again". I've come to see medium and google captcha as mental filters for judging the overall technical competence of the firm deploying them.

Any article there does not deserve to be read. You are not missing anything

They should have kept Google Buzz and Google Talk alive

I think the reason they got rid of Buzz was a legal issue re: privacy. Not sure how practical it was to keep it alive, but I do miss it.

Totally missing from that blog post: People won't want to use something if Google tries to cram it down their neck. I lost count of the various dirty tactics they used to try force me onto it.

That is the number 1 reason why it failed.

It's legit just not caring about customers.

- Want to keep using RSS? Fuck you.

- Want to keep using Google Wave? Fuck you.

- Want support on your adsense account? Lol, nope.

- Account got banned or limited inappropriately? Fuck you.

- Want to keep your YouTube and Google accounts separate? Fuck you.

- Want to get your domain whitelisted in Gmail? Fuck you.

I could go on and on..

They simply do not care about their customers.

I also think they have issues with developers because they abandon technologies that they push for a while and constantly break backward compatibility. A lot of times they are doing this with a good technical intent. But its like they are telling you that you need to invest in retooling your apps for their platforms. If it isn't worth it to you-- too bad so sad.

I've personally known this for a decade and I'm glad people are finally getting pissed off with Google's arbitrary stranglehold on the rules and regulations of the WWW. You either play by their rules or you go out of business. Their rules suck though. AMP can go straight to hell.

Some companies try to disrupt markets, but Google tends to disrupt their customers. Not sure that makes sense.

A customer is someone who pays for a service, and I'm not sure the listed examples qualify.

Apple sent Agents Provocatuer to sign up and try to add all the shit Apple knew was failmodery. So hookers, thieves, pests, and other conpeople infested the place soon drove people out. The hangout eyes = horrible. Once Apple did this, it was snakebit and doomed to die...

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