On the other hand, Google+ needed, strategically, to get real use, and so far it hasn't been seeing much of that. Hangouts are useful, but the idea that people would use them as Google intended (as a "cool" emergent social behavior rather than something people would only do with people they know well) was hopeless without a context (such as a board game, a great tool for overcoming the initial social awkwardness that is common among interesting people) that could encourage the "hanging out". Without such a context squarely in the center, people won't use hangouts for more free-form purposes than "regular old" video chat. It's an admirable vision, though.
This is why, in my short time at Google, I was obsessed with raising the issue of game quality, even though I was nowhere near that team (there was zero G+ activity in New York). I realized that Games had the potential to be a critical battle for the product's ability to establish itself and get users comfortable with product. With social network fatigue in an advanced state ca. 2011, the only thing that could get people in a new general-purpose social network for long enough to get comfortable with the thing was high-quality games (not Zynga shit). Google blew it on that one, resulting in a missed opportunity that can be measured in the tens to hundreds of millions, and possibly billions.
Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos). It was that, and the fact that, when the shit hit the fan, I did some white-hat trolling and outed unethical management (eng-misc) instead of just taking it.