I was an early Google+ skeptic. Shortly after it launched, I likened its main feature—the ability to divide your friends into discrete groups, called Circles—to the process of creating a seating chart for your wedding. In theory, it was appealing to send “private” messages to certain groups, but in practice I thought most people would find it tedious to categorize their friendships.
In practice I find it very compelling and use it for the majority of my posts. And so do most people. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_users_2-3_t...
Which is also why he's wrong about:
Traffic-analysis firms have consistently reported Google+’s traffic to be declining from its early peak.
And yet, I’ve been surprised by just how dreary the site has become.
I don't follow anyone interesting on Google+. Therefore, Google+ is boring.
Why am I so sure that Google+ can’t be saved? Because there’s no way to correct Google’s central failure. Back when companies were clamoring to create brand pages on the network—or users were looking to create profiles with pseudonyms, another phenomenon that Google shut down—the company ought to have acceded to its users’ wishes and accommodated them. If Google wasn’t ready for brand pages in the summer, it shouldn’t have launched Google+ until it was. And this advice goes more generally—by failing to offer people a reason to keep coming back to the site every day, Google+ made a bad first impression. And in the social-networking business, a bad first impression spells death.
This is barely an argument. Brand pages? Who cares about brand pages, really?[0] Brands do. Not people. I promise you not a single normal user went on the service and said, "What? I can't follow Dr. Pepper here? I'm gone!" Google gives me a really, really good reason to return every day. There's a little notification box every time I use gmail or search or maps or docs.
Online social networks are very, very young. To imagine that you can predict success or failure based on your narrow experience of the very few successful social networks that have existed is pure unadulterated bullshit.
[0]: I really hope Google does start focusing on regular users more instead of very peripheral concerns like brands.