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Comment by vogon_laureate | Hacker News Reader

Toward the end, many people working on the Reader team, which was a dozen people at its height, were poached for the now defunct Google+.

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A lot happened around the time of Google+. Whether because of it I cannot say, but it was in nothing but a pipe dream a substite for:

Google Wave chaos collaboration brilliance vs the conventional Google+ was killed prior to Google+.

Free GMail/limited apps for Domains. This was killed for new domains in 2012, and merging/destroying through failed merge via single sign on to YouTube/other services. Generic services weren't a good substitute for 'owning' a name via domain.

XMPP was killed by G+ Hangouts in 2013.

Reader, of course.

It seemed like G+ killed anything that it could, in any fractional way, be deemed a substitute for. The memory I have of these products were of functional things. The memory I have of G+ is a large whitespace screen with an avatar and exceptionally mediocre half solutions. G+ was not fun, it wasn't social, it wasn't even average.

I could never get my head around G+. It felt like almost every decision and element of it was sociopathic rather than social.

Hangouts, in the original form of "Real time, unstructured video call" was pretty cool. The rest was insane.

I thought circles was a great way to interact socially.

Yep, that was a wonderful design. I wish it took off, and I wish it hadn't been a harbinger of the downfall of so many other wonderful Google products.

Yeah someone made a clone of the circles UI to put your Facebook contacts into Friend Lists which I used for a while, always wondered why Facebook didn't just steal that to get around people being worried about their parents seeing their party pix (back before the youth had 100% abandoned Facebook)

Twitter has Twitter Circles which I think it similar. I'm not really sure how many people actually use it. I remember the G+ circles at least had the novelty factor but it still felt like an effort to manage.

Also Reader was a competitor to google+ as it had the feature of finding and reading content, but in a much more user pleasing way and that made google way less money.

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