But Google Plus succeeded - all the permanent employees got a special bonus because of Google’s success in social (first part is sarcastic, second is true).
I was at Google watching the tech all hands with my boss when they announced that "social multiplier" (bonuses tied to success of G+) was going to apply to everyone in the company.
I turned to my boss and said, shit, our bonuses are going to be fucked because G+ is going to flop.
My boss told me not to worry, since "they are never going to be able to admit that this was a failure".
Sure enough, management tried to bullshit everyone on how successful G+ was and we ended up getting a high multiplier for the "success".
Pod seems to only be the "just run your stuff" part on paper, which would be nice, only problem is it sucks. Every little thing you want to do is a huge codelab, and it's less supported. So people default to Boq instead.
Instead they forced it on everyone using any Google product, hurting the product itself, but also preventing the critical feedback loop that would have allowed G+ to improve, and become organically successful.
Also I think Messenger may have been faster than Hangouts. It was not faster than GChat, but it didn't matter because Google killed it and that definitely drove me to use Messenger more.
You have your Instagram, then your close friends list on Instagram. Then your finsta. And the close friends list on your finsta.
All of these are just g+ circles.
The advantage of FB was also that you saw content, whereas on Google+ everyone would have it locked up and you couldn't see it, great for the less popular types.
Parts of it made sense, maybe a bit too early, not enough people using it.
Circles feature was also marketed the wrong way. The G+ ad showed a lady bad-mouthing her boss in a circle that doesn't include him. Who's gonna put that much faith in the separation? The entire point of a finsta is that it's not a supported feature, so you can believe that it's totally separate and also has a different name. You'd use the finsta to bad-mouth your boss, if you're a weirdo who friends their boss in the first place.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/vic-gundotra-the-father-of...
(It also helps to find target communities not well-served by incumbents -- like, perhaps, the multiple communities who interacted poorly with Facebook's "real names" policy. But instead, Google leadership insisted on copying that policy, and in a particularly heavy-handed way, to the point that Google employees couldn't register accounts with nicknames that they were actually known by to colleagues and family alike; see e.g. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/why-googles-rea... )
Google+ was pretty great. It had some really wonderful special interest communities, and it was really easy to separate my family identity from my tinkerer identity from my friends stuff. The whole circles and squares thing was a wonderful, front and center, privacy-focused metaphor, like some product people actually listened to what actual online community Ph.Ds were saying.
But the execs made everything worse repeatedly in an attempt to drive success metrics up.
"We already have a huge user base, we'll just automatically sign them up for <new thing> and get it off to a running start". No, these users will hate you for it and in fact ruin the experience for the select few who are actually interested. Meanwhile executives will tout the rosy user growth metrics, declare the launch a success and collect their bonuses.
There is no substitute for old-fashioned organic growth. Start small. Focus on early power users and listen to their feedback. Have something unique that sets you apart from the competition and attracts more users. This is how Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and the like were able to establish themselves in Facebook's presence while Google+ failed.
Adding a new notification about everytime someone follows you is just asking for people to avoid the product
Poor UX management
Google+ was competing head on with Facebook which had a huge leverage in terms of the network effect.
Well, it was more colorful I suppose.
It wasn't just the execution, the basic idea was bad. The few people this overly complicated thing would appeal to are probably not the kind to use social media either.
* It made a lot of coddled high-energy employees continue to feel valued and engaged and not jump to a competitor.
* It forced users to unify accounts making cookie joining and user data from different segments much more universally accessible to ads.
* It brought design uniformity to G on the web, which is an important to contrast the Google brand with the otherwise fragmented Android space.
* Lasting revenue and user data from Google Photos and Drive.
Google plus was Google doing what it does best: solving Google problems. It never had a chance as a product, but they didn’t need for it to win. They needed to re-consolidate data input to Ads and defend against a talent drain.
G+ birthed the "create account / log in with Google" widget for non-Google websites, that could go alongside the "log in with FB" widget that was getting popular. Those widgets let Google / FB join your account cookies with whatever other ads get shown on the page.
G+ lead to a dramatically changed privacy policy that dramatically increaed data sharing.
I have seen articles claiming all sorts of "benefits" of the War, and I believe that was one of them. The coup of 1965, which massacred a million "Communists" was in there.
2. OKRs are not automatically public (some teams choose to publish theirs; many don't).
It takes incredible and very rare leadership to be able to admit failures downstream.
I have FB and refuse to use it, Twitter is purely for bored doom scrolling and thats about all I use.
Google+ was great, worked exactly how i wanted it and didn't try to sell me crap i didnt want to know about
I could log into FB, browse the world-famous UC Berkeley meme page, RSVP for a comp sci talk, message my 8 group chats, sell my iClicker, buy a dining commons swipe, and message one of those "my sister needs a date for a party" ads all in one place.