Why Google+ Failed

I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched...<p>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&#x27;s also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;googly.&quot;<p>Finally, there was &quot;Real Names.&quot; 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 &quot;Real Names&quot; happened and people stopped asking for invites overnight. That&#x27;s the moment for me when the tide turned against this thing.<p>I really liked the initial Google+ UI personally, but the UI ran head-on into the nonsensical &quot;Kennedy&quot; 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 &quot;Kennedy&quot; in a tiny font you&#x27;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.<p>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.

I find it ironic that the author is trying to detail core reasons why Google+ failed when they themselves admit they don&#x27;t use any social media.<p>While I didn&#x27;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 &quot;we can make a better version of Facebook&quot;. There was no real use case.<p>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&#x27;t even use any of the social media tools and they didn&#x27;t get &quot;social&quot;. To them it was some thing you plug on top of an existing product to increase ad revenue.<p>If you don&#x27;t have the drive and you don&#x27;t understand your users, you aren&#x27;t going to build something people want.

I think most of the damage from the &quot;real names&quot; 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&#x27;d previously signed up with anything that didn&#x27;t look like a &quot;real name&quot;, in many cases locking them out of their entire Google account.<p>And then shortly after that, having learned nothing, they started hunting down and banning accounts that appeared to be for businesses, since their &quot;Google+ for business&quot; offering wasn&#x27;t ready yet. By the time it was, nobody wanted to put their business on Google+ anymore.<p>Finally, after it was already dead (but they didn&#x27;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.<p>Google+ is the demarcation between the old Google that consistently did amazing things and the new Google that, well, mostly doesn&#x27;t.

I think a lot of it came down to their &quot;invite-only&quot; launch. I remember a lot of my friends were excited to try it. Some of us were able to get invites, some weren&#x27;t. Eventually the people who couldn&#x27;t get on right away just said &quot;screw it&quot; and went back to Facebook. The rest of us followed because that&#x27;s where we could interact with everyone and not just the people who happened to get on Google+.<p>By the time it opened up to everyone, nobody cared anymore. I can&#x27;t believe somebody thought it would be a good idea to restrict access to a product that depends on network effects to succeed.

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 &quot;did you see so and so&#x27;s G+ post&quot; 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.<p>The other thing I thought maybe killed G+ was the &quot;ghost town&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s sad. G+ could have done so well.

The problem with Google+ is that using it felt like <i>work</i>.<p>It had some nice ideas, and was in many ways better than Facebook. But it wasn&#x27;t fun, and it wasn&#x27;t somewhere that was pleasant to hang out for long.<p>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&#x27;t see how exactly that benefited me.<p>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.

The &quot;Non-organic growth&quot; section covers Google+&#x27;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.<p>Because of this, my Gmail contacts could see the comments I&#x27;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&#x27;d watched and commented on.<p>Now, I don&#x27;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.

The decision to name it &quot;Google+&quot; was an epic blunder. You wouldn&#x27;t ask a girl at a club if she&#x27;s on &quot;McDonalds+&quot;. You wouldn&#x27;t ask a member of your church if they&#x27;d like to connect on &quot;American Airlines Plus&quot;.<p>When Facebook was at the height of its coolness (like 2007, 2008), most people didn&#x27;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.

&gt;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.<p>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&#x27;s constant, full-screen begging that blocked even passive Youtube usage.<p>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.

While I do (mostly) agree with this article, it fails to mention the #1 reason why I never used it. I couldn&#x27;t post something on someone else&#x27;s page. I could post something to my &quot;feed&quot; and they could happen to see it. But I couldn&#x27;t post something into their &quot;feed&quot; (wall, timeline) where all their friends could see it and then comment on it.<p>It was more like Twitter than Facebook. Maybe I&#x27;m wrong, but too me they were marketing &quot;Twitter with pictures&quot; as &quot;Facebook&quot;, and they fell short.

I feel dumb for saying it, but I didn&#x27;t understand &quot;circles&quot;.<p>I think I actually did but I found it a bit confusing and assumed I didn&#x27;t understand.<p>Actually generally I didn&#x27;t understand what Google thought the workflow for Google+ was &quot;supposed to be.&quot; 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&#x27;m not sure how they think I should use their product(s).<p>I loved the look, but I didn&#x27;t really get what I was supposed to be doing and how things worked.<p>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&#x27;s not what I want from a product like that.

Turns out &quot;engineered social interactions&quot; is indeed an oxymoron. Also, Google&#x27;s work structure where most product leads don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s a great business model and they made a huge commercial success. But the &quot;do no evil&quot; bullshit and the cult-like attitude of googlers is just pathetic.

The non-organic growth was more than &#x27;just creating me an account&#x27; - there seemed to be a fair amount of &quot;stick&quot; to help me move.<p>My beloved Google Reader got killed and the latitude feature in my Google Maps was pulled with an explicit &#x27;if you want this feature use Google+&#x27;<p>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&#x2F;worse.<p>The idea of being able to create &#x27;groups&#x27; was fine in theory - but bit of a mess in reality. Can&#x27;t remember the exact details as it&#x27;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&#x27;t &#x27;trust&#x27; the separation. On Facebook, LinkedIn, random forum - you don&#x27;t consider each post and choose the audience.<p>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.

Realnames. It was entirely Realnames on launch.<p>Realnames Realnames Realnames.<p>Realnames stopped people joining just at a point where Facebook was being incredibly shitty.

I think Google+ failed first and foremost because there wasn&#x27;t any reason to switch.<p>First, it didn&#x27;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&#x27;t offer anything fundamentally different from Facebook: it was very similar, just with far fewer people to talk to.<p>Second, Google+ wasn&#x27;t cool. Most successful non-niche social networks seem to grow from young people first: young people enjoy having an online space that&#x27;s separate from older friends&#x2F;family. Then, as the network becomes more popular, older folks join. This is loosely the trend we&#x27;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&#x2F;or unique. Google+ wasn&#x27;t very cool or unique: it seemed to target everyone at all once.<p>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&#x27;t any compelling reason to use the network.<p>(I&#x27;m a Googler, but my opinions are my own)

This is a classic case of smart people jumping head-first into a problem with only a superficial understanding of what makes something successful.<p>I&#x27;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 &quot;We&#x27;re going to FIX mobile gaming!&quot; And then they would fail spectacularly because their mental model of the problem didn&#x27;t accurately reflect reality.<p>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&#x27;d love to see some commentary from someone who worked on that, but my impression was that they didn&#x27;t understand that the FB platform&#x27;s extreme ease of use and developer-friendliness was what made it work well, and that the platform&#x27;s scale was a value-add on top of that.

&gt; My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot.<p>Like what? I&#x27;m in my 20s-- I haven&#x27;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.

The key element of why Google+ failed is deeper than these arguments.<p>The key reason is because Google didn&#x27;t do any &#x27;human&#x27; testing before release.<p>They should have picked a school or town or even a small country and released it <i>just</i> for those people.<p>If it didn&#x27;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.<p>As OP points out, without data, you can&#x27;t make good decisions, and most decisions in a social product can&#x27;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.

Google Plus failed because of the following reasons:<p>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&#x27;t make sense to make Google Plus invite only. You are just limiting the growth of your product. It was dumb.<p>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&#x27;t be able to know about my lego and arduino posts, and they wouldn&#x27;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).<p>3) Real Name Why try to go this route? I just didn&#x27;t understand. Maybe requirements from higher-higher up?<p>4) Slow UI While the UI looked good, I am not sure how good of an experience was it. It was definetly SLOW.<p>All they had to do was to make a facebook clone. Then slowly polish it.

I will agree with the author that FB isn&#x27;t invulnerable, but IMO Google+ simply wasn&#x27;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&#x27;t anything substantially better from the user&#x27;s perspective to encourage a shift enmasse.<p>This isn&#x27;t so much Google+&#x27;s failure as a product as it was the astounding success of FB at keeping it&#x27;s users. Google+ definitely had some cool and interesting features, but people just didn&#x27;t care. I think a great case study would be to see why MySpace failed to keep it&#x27;s users and FB got them, and why Google+ couldn&#x27;t achieve the same critical mass.<p>I think the eventual fracturing of the features of Google+ and migration into other products was a smart move.<p>Here&#x27;s an example conversation I had at the time with someone about why we should switch over to Google+:<p>Me: It&#x27;s better! Cool features<p>Friend: Ya but w&#x2F;e FB already has everyone there...plus those features are meh<p>Me: Ya but privacy!<p>Friend: Let&#x27;s be real, Google and FB make money the same way...ain&#x27;t no one&#x27;s privacy gonna get in the way of that<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>I wrote about this a while ago and submitted it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19515513" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19515513</a>

Instagram is very unidirectional. So is wechat (the instagram-like feature within China).<p>The whole &quot;influencer&quot; phenomenon (originating in the Chinese KOL - Key Opinion Leaders - phenomenon) is specifically engineered to be a unidirectional mechanism.<p>In fact, Snapchat tried to do the same with &quot;Discover&quot;, which ended up in Google Plus territory. It was not very usable.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s important whether Google+ failed or whether Facebook declines or not.<p>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?

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&#x27;ve ever seen, the only one I&#x27;ve got addicted to and the only one I&#x27;ve actually written posts to. All Google had to do with it was adding youtube-like recommendations (many people complained it was &quot;empty&quot; 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&#x27;t try to do any of the things that people who desired a different kind of social space might have wanted but couldn&#x27;t get on Facebook at the time, perhaps things like anonymous accounts, private groups that didn&#x27;t transitively leak information, or a space for collaboration on Google Docs. In other words, it made zero innovation over the incumbent, except for &quot;circles&quot;, which was ill conceived.

&gt; You’ve reached the end of your free member preview for this month. Become a member now for $5&#x2F;month to read this story and get unlimited access to all of the best stories on Medium.<p>You have to pay to read Medium now?

Computer networking in general and social apps in particular are still young, in civilization&#x27;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&#x27;s lack of traction was from the interaction among several subtle ingredients.

One thing I don&#x27;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&#x27;m not a social person, so maybe I wasn&#x27;t a target audience of Google+, but for all its flaws I actually loved asymmetrical following model. That means I can &quot;follow&quot; a friend of college friend whom I might have met twice, just because they say something interesting, without wondering &quot;Wait do I still count as their friend? What if they remember me and I really don&#x27;t? It&#x27;s gonna be awkward...&quot;<p>Similarly these kind-of-friends can follow me because they find me interesting and I&#x27;ll feel no pressure to follow them back. Half of the time I get a friend request in Facebook, I don&#x27;t really know the person (but I have reasons to expect that the person thinks they &quot;know&quot; me) so it feels awkward either to accept or decline.<p>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:<p>Facebook used its invite-only (campus-only, .edu only) natural to build status.<p>However, a college campus is a <i>dense subgraph</i> of the overall human social network. People in college are socially interacting with mostly other people in their college.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This makes almost everyones&#x27; first use experience suck. A B2C product where everyones first use experience sucks is dead on arrival.<p>I remember discussing this at the time. It seemed like madness to me. (I was doing a PhD studying social graphs.)<p>My first tweet on twitter, from 2010, is about Google Buzz (a preceding social product): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;fergal_reid&#x2F;status&#x2F;8974231887" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;fergal_reid&#x2F;status&#x2F;8974231887</a> &quot;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.&quot;<p>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&#x27;m reminded of this XKCD: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;918&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;918&#x2F;</a><p>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:<p>1. The real name policy was draconian. Leadership didn’t listen to internal or external outcries for far too long.<p>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.<p>3. Circles were frankly a chore to manage.<p>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.<p>However, it didn&#x27;t do what Google wanted. It didn&#x27;t capture my attention for hours and get me to engage with all kinds of corporate marketing and ads. It didn&#x27;t teach Google anything about me (to be used to sell me stuff later) that it didn&#x27;t already know.<p>We know with social media, we are the product, not the customer. So Google+ didn&#x27;t fail, <i>we</i> failed. I was a great customer of G+, but I guess I wasn&#x27;t a very good product.

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

I think G+ failed because of design system. The effect of auto popup when you hover the + button is annoying, at least to me.<p>The overall design is &quot;circle&quot;, which i think is annoying for most of people, too.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;cytZl" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;cytZl</a>

G+ failed by not understanding Facebook <i>and</i> by not having any intention of giving disgruntled Facebook users what they wanted.<p>My sense is Facebook in particular brought as many people &quot;online&quot; as did all the previous Internet innovations combined.<p>Essentially, it did this by giving the functionality of previous online communication approaches while minimizing the noise <i>and</i> merging these together into a &quot;real&quot; relationship called &quot;friend&quot;. (Facebook didn&#x27;t do more than email, blogs and chat, it did <i>less</i> but in a way that people wanted).<p>Online data can easily form a stream of bits and bytes each person puts together into a different form. This stream only becomes &quot;a thing&quot;, a &quot;document&quot;, etc when some group of people all perceive it the same way. Facebook made &quot;friends&quot;, &quot;posts&quot; and so-forth into &quot;things&quot;.<p>Just as much, human relationships have always had a tension between social-contextual identities and universal identities, between &quot;real&quot; 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&#x27;s privacy model was broken and inherently broken but it still was key to Facebook&#x27;s success because it&#x27;s what people want, what human social interactions assume - ie, you can tell your friends things and they&#x27;ll remain &quot;secret&quot;. It&#x27;s not true in the real world and it&#x27;s not true on Facebook but it&#x27;s what people to believe.<p>And yeah, G+ failed by not understanding any of this. I don&#x27;t know exactly how many people understood this then aside from Facebook.

I think there&#x27;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 (“&lt;rando&gt; 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.<p>By the time they started doing basic UX work most people I knew had already either uninstalled it or been trained to ignore it.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>At the time, Google had much more goodwill than today and there&#x27;s a chance people would have used it just so they could use Google instead of Facebook.

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?<p>Facebook was already dominant and Google+ offered nothing really compelling besides a half baked circles&#x2F;groups thing that took forever to manage.<p>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.<p>They were concerned about driving metrics, and only tangentially building a product.<p>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 &quot;engaged users&quot; group, it was fantastic.

They lost me on the &quot;real names&quot; 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.

Actually, I still miss Google+. It was one of the few places I could have meaningful conversation about topics.<p>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 &#x27;pubilc&#x27; I rarely see anyone outside of my group interacting with me.<p>I guess the closest major one right now is Twitter. Google+ was certainly hitting some sweetspot between Twitter and Facebook for me.

&quot;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?&quot;<p>Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat... The greater issue to me doesn&#x27;t seem to be who can beat Facebook but rather, what&#x27;s going to keep Facebook from buying up any real threat that&#x27;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&#x2F;3 of the people. I wasn’t going to “share” things if I thought only one person would see the post.<p>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 <i>more Google</i>. It doesn&#x27;t really make sense why they choose that name, seems lazy and boring...<p>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&#x27;t remember anyone being excited about it in my <i>social network</i>)...

My biggest qualms with G+ was that it was constantly changing...<p>I would log in every few weeks&#x2F;months and something was different.<p>G+: Hey, check out this new feature!<p>Me: But I uhhh...<p>G+: Oh, and we implemented this too, isn&#x27;t it great!?<p>Me: Well sure but...<p>G+: And we removed that one feature that you did actually kind of use, it&#x27;s now this.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Imagine one of these social networks actually had APIs for you to manage contacts, group them, control publishing and consumption, etc. Most people wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;circles&quot; I created were mine. I didn&#x27;t realize, and assume Google wanted me not to realize, that the people I put in circles could see each other.<p>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.

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.<p>These days, I&#x27;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.<p>(I can’t find the link right now but will update when I do)

For what it&#x27;s worth, regarding the asymmetric interactions, if my memory serves me right, it seemed to be Google+ that made Facebook introduce the notion of &quot;Following&quot; 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&#x27;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+&#x27;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&#x27;t pleasant to look at. And no one understood what a circle is.

Why did they end it? Was it losing money?<p>In some ways it seemed superior to the other giants, plus it was tied to most peoples&#x27; google accounts.<p>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&#x27;s Google. They would have killed it someday anyway. Had it lived longer, there would only be more angry users that wouldn&#x27;t have got their data out.

Didn&#x27;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”.<p>Smurf+, Smurf Assistant, &quot;Hey Smurf...&quot;, Smurf Home Hub...

Google+ failed, but it begat Google Photos which is not a failure.<p>obDisclosure: I&#x27;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.<p>If they would just fiddle with YouTube they might get into trouble but now they&#x27;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:<p>* Made it hard to &quot;post something on someone&#x27;s wall&quot;<p>* Terrible redesign after redesign

&quot;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.&quot;<p>If you think vicg made only 10x an L5 salary then I have bad news for you.<p>One day I&#x27;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?

Google engineer Steve Yegge said:<p><i>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&#x27;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: &quot;So is it the Stalker API?&quot; She got all glum and said &quot;Yeah.&quot; I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone&#x27;s stream. So I guess the joke was on me.</i><p>The full Yegge rant is at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;chitchcock&#x2F;1281611" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;chitchcock&#x2F;1281611</a>

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.<p>G+ failed for multiple reasons, despite being successful in numerous particulars. I miss it, though I don&#x27;t regret its passing.<p>As with other criticisms, this one is on point in noting that the failures were of leadership (and <i>all</i> the way up the stack: Bradley, Vic, Larry, Eric), and architectural.<p>Site mechanics (good points by Talin), unreliable messaging, and the &quot;let&#x27;s cram this down everyone&#x27;s throats&quot; elements all left a very bitter taste.<p>What Talin omits in particular (though it&#x27;s alluded to briefly) was the extent to which Google directly fought many of Google+&#x27;s biggest enthusiasts, with #nymwars (the Real Names policy), noted, being only one of the most notable instances.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s annointed &quot;TCs&quot; (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.<p>Another element creating tremendous distrust was Google&#x27;s repeated ridiculous statements as to the site&#x27;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:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stonetemple.com&#x2F;real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stonetemple.com&#x2F;real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...</a><p>Later 2018&#x2F;2019 analysis of G+ Communities further cemented these findings. This also showed the huge value of <i>regularly contributed, fresh, relevant content</i> to success, over raw subscriber counts. Post recency was a far bigger prediction of other engagement (comments, +1s, reshares) than subscribers.<p>See:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.antefriguserat.de&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Migrating_Google%2B_Communities#Google.2B_Community_Characteristics_and_Membership" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.antefriguserat.de&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;Migrating_Google%...</a><p>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, &quot;google plus&quot; doesn&#x27;t sound right specially for a social network, also &quot;Hangouts&quot; is a terrible name, it doesn&#x27;t internationalize well nor does it work for an enterprise setting, and &quot;keep&quot; is a good app but it should be called &quot;google notes&quot; nevermind they already used that name on a now defunct product.<p>Google has been worse at naming products than they have a right to be.

I am sorry for the off topic comment but I can&#x27;t even read this article because medium now shows me a &quot;Sign up for an extra read&quot; popup without any way of closing it. Medium is going so down the tubes, it&#x27;s become impossible for me to read anything there. Does anyone have a way to bypass the sign up pop up?

They should have kept Google Buzz and Google Talk alive

Totally missing from that blog post: People won&#x27;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.<p>That is the number 1 reason why it failed.

It&#x27;s legit just not caring about customers.<p>- Want to keep using RSS? Fuck you.<p>- Want to keep using Google Wave? Fuck you.<p>- Want support on your adsense account? Lol, nope.<p>- Account got banned or limited inappropriately? Fuck you.<p>- Want to keep your YouTube and Google accounts separate? Fuck you.<p>- Want to get your domain whitelisted in Gmail? Fuck you.<p>I could go on and on..<p>They simply do not care about their customers.

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...