26 ms·

Why Google+ Failed

• Causality1 7y ago
  >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. 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's constant, full-screen begging that blocked even passive Youtube usage. 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.
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
    > I took that as a personal affront You're not the only one, and I wonder how much that feeling contributed to the failure of Google+. Because the harder Google tried to shove it down my throat, the more I resented it and swore to myself that I wouldn't touch it.
    • eitland 7y ago
      Yep. It also happened around the same time when they ditched Reader. I never used Reader and don't care too much personally, but it seems they angered a small but vocal community that felt they were sacrificed for Google+.
  • jimmies 7y ago
    This, Google was shoving the Hancock down to every Google user. It didn't just die by itself. Google Talk was killed with Google+ too. It was a functional, no-nonsense IM that just worked and worked everywhere. After they engulfed this into Google+, it just became a bloated monstrosity that no one could understand. Remember when it suggested you every Google+ user when you tried to type a friend's name in Hangouts? Yeah... that was pretty fucked up. I am just amazed that Youtube didn't die with it after it was used as a gateway to Google+.
    • netsharc 7y ago
      > This, Google was shoving the Hancock down to every Google user. My brain read that as "down every Google user's throat", and I got an idea why they decided to name it that.
    • rchaud 7y ago
      Google Talk was fantastic. The desktop experience was great, and the mobile apps were flawless, even on Nokia Symbian and Blackberry 6 OS. It's the only Google product that felt fun to use. I haven't bothered with Hangouts, Allo, Duo or any of the stuff that followed it.
  • taneq 7y ago
    This along with the forced YouTube integration were particularly egregious. Then there was the bit where they started forcing people to use real names. Overall they showed zero respect for their users and people deserted them accordingly.
  • varjag 7y ago
    That's what you get when some team's bonus depends on conversion rate.
  • Scarblac 7y ago
    I probably would have been interested at some point had I started using it by my own initiative, but I got forced into Google+ by this project. I didn't understand what it was (a bare bones Facebook clone? ), didn't have friends who used it and I can't remember if I saw no content or just only irrelevant content. I gave it maybe 15 minutes and never came back. And I actually considered myself an interested user, at the time I used Facebook but hated it and still saw Google as a force for good.
  • luisdfp 7y ago
    >It was going to set up a Google Plus account for every Google user. Oh god. Thanks to this dreadful decision I went from not giving a crap about G+ to actually despising it and wanting it to fail miserably. I had a youtube account long before Google took over and now all my activity was being posted on my G+ account feed or something. Now I had to turn that off. Thanks for letting everybody know that I liked some videos Barney the Dinosaur because I let my sister use my PC, Google.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
• fareesh 7y ago
  Too late to the party and no compelling reason to switch for normal people.
  • myhf 7y ago
    Late? It launched the same year as Instagram and Snapchat.
    • fareesh 7y ago
      It was a different product from a photograph app. It was a product more similar to Facebook / Twitter.
• foobar_ 7y ago
  They should have kept Google Buzz and Google Talk alive
  • mehrdadn 7y ago
    I think the reason they got rid of Buzz was a legal issue re: privacy. Not sure how practical it was to keep it alive, but I do miss it.
• slyall 7y ago
  http://archive.is/cytZl http://archive.is/cytZl
• RickSanchez2600 7y ago
  No business plan, no vision, lack of leadership, tried to copy Twitter and Facebook. Even Yahoo 360 was better.
  • varjag 7y ago
    Circles was a nice feature, which however was promptly matched by Facebook. You can't win on features in this market.
• tempodox 7y ago
  Come on, it's Google. They would have killed it someday anyway. Had it lived longer, there would only be more angry users that wouldn't have got their data out.
  • hkmurakami 7y ago
    Will they kill Gmail or YouTube in the future as well in your opinion?
    • varjag 7y ago
      Killing Gmail was probably on the roadmap when Wave was introduced.
• busymom0 7y ago
  I am sorry for the off topic comment but I can't even read this article because medium now shows me a "Sign up for an extra read" popup without any way of closing it. Medium is going so down the tubes, it's become impossible for me to read anything there. Does anyone have a way to bypass the sign up pop up?
  • gzimhelshani 7y ago
    Any article there does not deserve to be read. You are not missing anything
    • mekoka 7y ago
      That's not fair. Medium's content is community contributed. There's a lot of value in there. Let's not throw the baby with the water.
      • notatoad 7y ago
        if the author cares so little about their readers that they choose to distribute their content on medium, there's a good chance that content isn't worth reading.
        • skribbj 7y ago
          What's so bad about it?
        • mekoka 7y ago
          An author may care so much about readership that they value reaching 50 million people, over a few dozens, if the price to pay is some inconvenience with the medium (see what I did there?)
      • tastroder 7y ago
        That community of content creators chose the platform for the benefits of discovery, SEO and convenience. While I agree that there's great content on Medium, those upsides come with a few downsites for content consumers and losing a few of them comes with the territory. It's still a net positive for creators anyway, otherwise Medium wouldn't be a thing.
• f055 7y ago
  Turns out "engineered social interactions" is indeed an oxymoron. Also, Google's work structure where most product leads don'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'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's a great business model and they made a huge commercial success. But the "do no evil" bullshit and the cult-like attitude of googlers is just pathetic.
  • cycrutchfield 7y ago
    It’s “don’t be evil”, not “do no evil”. There’s a subtle but important difference.
    • paulryanrogers 7y ago
      Really? How does one distinguish being from doing in that sense? Scoring actions on an evilness scale and taking an average?
      • jjoonathan 7y ago
        Do as much evil as you want, just remember to rationalize it somehow!
      • kragen 7y ago
        Not being evil is achievable; most people achieve it. Doing no evil is impossible, even if you tie bells to your pants to avoid accidentally stepping on bugs.
    • memling 7y ago
      > It’s “don’t be evil”, not “do no evil”. There’s a subtle but important difference. So, too, the difference between "don't be evil" and "be good."
  • goldcd 7y ago
• combatentropy 7y ago
  Computer networking in general and social apps in particular are still young, in civilization'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's lack of traction was from the interaction among several subtle ingredients.
  • skybrian 7y ago
    Yes, even Facebook's "successful" model is kind of a failure because it encourages people to spam all their friends and relatives with crappy memes. It seems like a better model should somehow encourage people to think about their audience and post what they would appreciate.
    • zrobotics 7y ago
      So similar to IRC. As much as I hate their desktop client, Discord is actually ticking all the right boxes for what I want out of social media. Ironically one of these things: broadcasting specific things to specific groups, is something G+ tried to do. If I see an interesting paper, I don't want to share that on FB and have my grandmother making confused comments. But I do have a discord channel w/ some college friends where something like that is appreciated. At the same time, most of them aren't gamers, so gaming content is on a different channel. I don't even regularly use discord for their VOIP chat (arguably the reason they caught on), but unfortunately it is just easier to use for non-technical people than IRC.
      • slouch 7y ago
        I like this. I'm a Discord user with no real life friends on the service interacting with me, but I'd love to be able to suggest channels that don't exist on the WordPress server I use.
• sandGorgon 7y ago
  Instagram is very unidirectional. So is wechat (the instagram-like feature within China). The whole "influencer" phenomenon (originating in the Chinese KOL - Key Opinion Leaders - phenomenon) is specifically engineered to be a unidirectional mechanism. In fact, Snapchat tried to do the same with "Discover", which ended up in Google Plus territory. It was not very usable.
• eitland 7y ago
  Worst part is they refused to keep and improve the parts that actually worked well. I wrote about this a while ago and submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515513
  • Already__Taken 7y ago
    > Google plus had circles The problem was it relied on people self-categorizing their own content. So just some person in the reddit web design circle thinks sharing their dogs or kids photos is fine and at that point G+ was worthless to me. IT's just subreddits without the moderation.
    • dredmorbius 7y ago
      No, Circles required users to self-categorise other people's content. Leading to the inevitable "you're holding it wrong" accusations agaist the poster that they weren't posting correctly. Collections, a late feature addition, helped this markedly.
• Moxdi 7y ago
  from what i read, they tried to brute force the proyect, google+ was esentially an startup and they didnt followed the startup way
• usr1106 7y ago
  I don't think it's important whether Google+ failed or whether Facebook declines or not. 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?
  • phicoh 7y ago
    The is an open standard for messaging (XMPP). That didn't prevent Google and Facebook from starting on XMPP and then closing it off. There is ActivityPub (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub) but it's unlikely that any of the big parties is going to adopt it.
  • pessimizer 7y ago
    > Some might say social networking is out of scope for academic research. And you wouldn't even say that at this point, with the open-access movement and academics trying to think of alternative ways to do peer review and curation openly.
• pishpash 7y ago
  Nah dawg, Google+ failed because it didn't try to do any of the things that people who desired a different kind of social space might have wanted but couldn't get on Facebook at the time, perhaps things like anonymous accounts, private groups that didn't transitively leak information, or a space for collaboration on Google Docs. In other words, it made zero innovation over the incumbent, except for "circles", which was ill conceived.
  • qtplatypus 7y ago
    What do you mean transitivelu leak information? It was possible to set up a community that only members could read. And once the nymwars where won you could get pysdonymious accounts.
• jrockway 7y ago
  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 "did you see so and so's G+ post" 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. The other thing I thought maybe killed G+ was the "ghost town" 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. 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'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's sad. G+ could have done so well.
  • senectus1 7y ago
    totally agree... (as a non google person.. just a normal user)
  • tannhaeuser 7y ago
    I guess it's a fair post-mortem for G+ the product, but I'm personally more interested in what happens to content on G+. For example, Linus Torvalds blogged on it (eg. dead link https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCYpi5 https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCY... about why he switched away from Suse), and many others as well. The content is why I occasionally went there, and why people outside Google posted there (assuming a big name won't let them down); certainly not a generic group chat/mail site. We're being told on https://plus.google.com/ https://plus.google.com/ that [Google] are in the process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts and Google+ pages. but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?
    • whenchamenia 7y ago
• mehrdadn 7y ago
  For what it's worth, regarding the asymmetric interactions, if my memory serves me right, it seemed to be Google+ that made Facebook introduce the notion of "Following" people. They were a good idea, just not a substitute for symmetric relationships.
• sbr464 7y ago
  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.
  • onion2k 7y ago
    It seems odd for a company so large to not have its own social platform. I think that sort of thinking is partly why it failed. Google+ was a great idea for Google but presented very little benefit to the user over what they'd get on any other social platform. Unless there's compelling reason why then users aren't going to invest time and effort in using a product, and they're going to be annoyed if they're forced to.
  • erik_seaberg 7y ago
    You can't fire and forget a service at Google, promo-driven churn in the tech stack will break it sooner or later. So you have to staff every service for indefinite maintenance, or kill it in an orderly way. This is also what happened to Reader.
    • pishpash 7y ago
      So now our key internet services last about as long as the average team tenure. We really need open standards so we can rely on the internet as the infrastructure, not some cloud provider. Google will die one day like other services. One has to wonder about the fate of all the artifacts people entrust to it: they will be erased just like every time before.
• goldcd 7y ago
  The non-organic growth was more than 'just creating me an account' - there seemed to be a fair amount of "stick" to help me move. My beloved Google Reader got killed and the latitude feature in my Google Maps was pulled with an explicit 'if you want this feature use Google+' 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/worse. The idea of being able to create 'groups' was fine in theory - but bit of a mess in reality. Can't remember the exact details as it'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't 'trust' the separation. On Facebook, LinkedIn, random forum - you don't consider each post and choose the audience. 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.
• sumanthvepa 7y ago
  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.
  • xamuel 7y ago
    But all its success came from strong-arming people into using it, using the leverage Google had with all its other products. So it makes zero sense to compare it to a startup.
    • ksclarke 7y ago
      That's not where all its success came from. That's the one downfall the article got right. It was successful before that. Trying to shoehorn a bunch of people who didn't want to use it into using it was the mistake. It was doing just fine before that and it would have continued to grow organically. It was never going to be a Facebook replacement though. It was better than that.
  • unreal37 7y ago
    "90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds." By most actual metrics, Google+ was a failure. 90% of people went there "accidentally". They were trying to do something useful, travel to somewhere useful on the Internet, and clicking the plus.google.com link was a mistake! 90%!
  • pessimizer 7y ago
    Did it make a dime? If it didn't, I doubt that it would be considered an amazing success.
• londons_explore 7y ago
  The key element of why Google+ failed is deeper than these arguments. The key reason is because Google didn't do any 'human' testing before release. They should have picked a school or town or even a small country and released it just for those people. If it didn'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. As OP points out, without data, you can't make good decisions, and most decisions in a social product can'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.
  • skybrian 7y ago
    They tested it on Googlers. However, that's an atypical audience and more testing with a different group would have helped.
    • aflag 7y ago
      Your own employees barely count as users.
    • ggambetta 7y ago
      They tested it on Googlers, and we were extremely vocal about the things we didn't like, but were ignored by the higher ups (read: Vic), using the argument you mention - "oh, but you're not the typical users".
• nolite 7y ago
  They lost me on the "real names" fiasco
• magwa101 7y ago
  Didn't fail, they got a global login to all their systems.
• Marazan 7y ago
  Realnames. It was entirely Realnames on launch. Realnames Realnames Realnames. Realnames stopped people joining just at a point where Facebook was being incredibly shitty.
  • salad77 7y ago
    Real names AND the instant account lock with no hope of reversal if your name failed the opaque real name check. I lost access to a gmail account and everything associated with it because g+ didn't like my name. Account totally locked. Gone. Forever.
    • GeekyBear 7y ago
      Reading about other people being locked out of their Gmail account (with no recourse) was exactly what prevented me from even trying Google+.
      • cesarb 7y ago
        For me, it's gone further: reading about other people being locked out of their gmail account with no recourse, because of that real names policy, is the reason I've never logged into Youtube (since, as far as I understood, to log into Youtube you had to have a Google+ account). I still watch videos, but never while logged into gmail (and as a consequence, I've never commented on any Youtube video, or posted any videos I might have recorded).
• aerovistae 7y ago
  > My refusal to use Facebook means that I tend to miss out on a lot. Like what? I'm in my 20s-- I haven'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.
  • benburleson 7y ago
    For example: I was invited to an event this week, and to participate, I need to RSVP on the Facebook event... I could ask how to get around that, but I'm actually not that interested. The point is, the process has put a roadblock in my participation. But to be honest, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
    • nicky0 7y ago
      Think of it as a useful filter. If the event isn't important enough to actually invite you in person, it probably isn't worth bothering with.
      • benburleson 7y ago
        In this case, I was invited in person, but the event is part of a larger process and they wanted accurate accounting because attendance included free beer :-)
  • mkoryak 7y ago
    I'm in my 30s and have kids and no time, I don't see my friends very often because they are also in the same boat. So yeah, Facebook is a good place for me to keep up with people.
    • asah 7y ago
      Can confirm
      • lagg 7y ago
• duxup 7y ago
  I feel dumb for saying it, but I didn't understand "circles". I think I actually did but I found it a bit confusing and assumed I didn't understand. Actually generally I didn't understand what Google thought the workflow for Google+ was "supposed to be." 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'm not sure how they think I should use their product(s). I loved the look, but I didn't really get what I was supposed to be doing and how things worked. 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's not what I want from a product like that.
  • pavel_lishin 7y ago
    I understood circles. I spent two hours carefully categorizing everyone I added into the perfect Venn diagram. And then I realized that this was bonkers, and that I never wanted to do it again.
    • duxup 7y ago
      Yeah it seemed like you could put a lot of work into managing your circles ... and it wasn't apparent that you would get get nothing out of it until you did it.
      • ghaff 7y ago
        Like anything else you can overdo it. But, at a minimum, you will often want (somewhat overlapping) professional and personal groups. They made sense especially at a time when many people were realizing they didn't want all their social media to be one undifferentiated bucket.
    • conductr 7y ago
      Ya I never used it but assumed that was their way of trying to be Facebook LinkedIn and Twitter all at once. Problem being the world already had those services and by being separated the circle management is done for you.
• qwerty456127 7y ago
  Googel+ was by far the best social network I've ever seen, the only one I've got addicted to and the only one I've actually written posts to. All Google had to do with it was adding youtube-like recommendations (many people complained it was "empty" 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.
• xamuel 7y ago
  The decision to name it "Google+" was an epic blunder. You wouldn't ask a girl at a club if she's on "McDonalds+". You wouldn't ask a member of your church if they'd like to connect on "American Airlines Plus". When Facebook was at the height of its coolness (like 2007, 2008), most people didn'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.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• ninedays 7y ago
  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.
• hateful 7y ago
  While I do (mostly) agree with this article, it fails to mention the #1 reason why I never used it. I couldn't post something on someone else's page. I could post something to my "feed" and they could happen to see it. But I couldn't post something into their "feed" (wall, timeline) where all their friends could see it and then comment on it. It was more like Twitter than Facebook. Maybe I'm wrong, but too me they were marketing "Twitter with pictures" as "Facebook", and they fell short.
  • qwerty456127 7y ago
    Indeed it was more like Twitter. Yet it was better than Twitter because it didn't have the severe post length limit and it would let you create channels (both private and open) for specific selection of people you invite to discuss a particular subject.
  • leadingthenet 7y ago
    I never understood why you would want to do that. I also never see people do that on Facebook, is it an American thing?
    • joncrane 7y ago
      Well Happy Birthday wishes is the big one. Other times there's like maybe an inside joke or a picture or an anecdote that you think that their friends would enjoy more than your friends. It's used way more by younger people, though.
      • sverige 7y ago
        Actually, the story I hear from people under 35 or so is that Facebook is for old people like me (mid-50s), though I've never used it. My wife does, though. It seems awful. My daughter and her friends all use Instagram and Snapchat, or probably something else now. They have dormant Facebook accounts they made when they were teens / early 20s that they've purged of all meaningful content.
        • 7y ago
• TomMasz 7y ago
  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+.
• revskill 7y ago
  I think G+ failed because of design system. The effect of auto popup when you hover the + button is annoying, at least to me. The overall design is "circle", which i think is annoying for most of people, too.
• fyoving 7y ago
  I always thought the name had something to do with it, "google plus" doesn't sound right specially for a social network, also "Hangouts" is a terrible name, it doesn't internationalize well nor does it work for an enterprise setting, and "keep" is a good app but it should be called "google notes" nevermind they already used that name on a now defunct product. Google has been worse at naming products than they have a right to be.
  • aerovistae 7y ago
    Completely agreed. It's because the name sounds like it's referring to the company instead of a product. I'm happy to use Gmail, which comes across as its own thing, but I might be a little bit more reluctant to use Google mail. I'm happy to use YouTube, but Google YouTube? I don't know. Internet companies' names tend to refer to their flagship product, and become synonymous with it. But when they release other things with their name in front of it, like Google plus, it just sounds corporate.
    • Izkata 7y ago
      > I'm happy to use YouTube, but Google YouTube? I don't know. Sure we do: Google Video was a competitor to YouTube that few used. Then they bought YouTube, and eventually killed Google Video.
  • mattkevan 7y ago
    Feels like the same people responsible for Mircrosoft's product decisions in the 2000s have now all moved to Google, with a slight twist in strategy. When a Microsoft product didn't do well they called it something different and relaunched, hoping no-one realised it was the same old thing – e.g. Zune Music/Xbox Music/MSN Music/Groove Music/Microsoft Store etc. Google now* just kills it and launches something else, sometimes more than one, hoping no-one remembers the still-cooling corpse of the previous attempt. For example, they're now on their ninth attempt [0] at a messaging service with no end in sight. *Google Now is also dead. [0]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-ninth-attempt-at-a-messaging-service-will-be-based-on-rcs/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/google-ninth-attempt...
• eddie_catflap 7y ago
  One thing I don'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.
• mattkevan 7y ago
  The problem with Google+ is that using it felt like work. It had some nice ideas, and was in many ways better than Facebook. But it wasn't fun, and it wasn't somewhere that was pleasant to hang out for long. 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't see how exactly that benefited me. 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.
  • SamBam 7y ago
    They learned the wrong lesson from the Gmail invites. The artificial scarcity of Gmail invites worked better than their wildest dreams. People were selling invites on eBay, trading then, etc. It worked really well to generate buzz. So of course they tried to replicate it. But if you're the only Gmail user among your friends, you can still email them. As you say, if you're the only Google+ user, you have no one to talk to.
    • gravitas 7y ago
      I really think the author missed this social point, and it's an extremely important one. As a tech nerd, I had fellow tech nerds who had G+ but I was unable to secure an invite, like many others. It was just frustrating and caused people to develop an anti-G+ attitude before they could even get onto the service. I distinctly recall a wave (lasted about... 2 weeks?) of serious internet hype where many contacts on Facebook saying they wanted to get on G+ to try and and get away from FB, yet could not get an account due to this rollout methodology. It's my personal opinion this was the shot they missed - you don't keep away the early adopters who will bring in their non-tech friends over time.
      • jimktrains2 7y ago
        Speaking of wave, Google wave too. Really excellent idea, but if you couldn't collaborate with anyone but yourself (because of invites), you aren't really "collaborating" and all the benefits of wave are lost.
• mrbanks 7y ago
  Totally missing from that blog post: People won'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. That is the number 1 reason why it failed.
• echelon 7y ago
  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. Imagine one of these social networks actually had APIs for you to manage contacts, group them, control publishing and consumption, etc. Most people wouldn't interact that way, but the power users would.
• imgabe 7y ago
  I think a lot of it came down to their "invite-only" launch. I remember a lot of my friends were excited to try it. Some of us were able to get invites, some weren't. Eventually the people who couldn't get on right away just said "screw it" and went back to Facebook. The rest of us followed because that's where we could interact with everyone and not just the people who happened to get on Google+. By the time it opened up to everyone, nobody cared anymore. I can't believe somebody thought it would be a good idea to restrict access to a product that depends on network effects to succeed.
  • trevize1138 7y ago
    Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. I know a few friend were hopeful that Google+ meant they would no longer see posts from their racist uncle or gullible aunt. Start out with that same kind of exclusivity and hopefully it builds this exclusive mystique so when you open it up to everybody you get a flood. Perhaps the big difference they didn't factor in is FB did this when relatively few people were on social media so they couldn't help but grow whereas Google+ needed to recognize they were trying to enter an already saturated market.
    • Redoubts 7y ago
      > Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. It wasn't just that. At the beginning, you had to be at an Ivy League. And that was the problem, G+ was invite only among a bunch of nerds, whereas FB was invite only among people who network for a living.
      • comicjk 7y ago
        I don't think the nerd/Ivy distinction you're making is significant. Most students at Ivy League schools are nerds, at least by the standards of broader society (you need good grades to get in). Few of them "network for a living." If anything, the real distinction is that a network for college students is appealing to teenagers, who are the perfect audience for social media. A network for adults doesn't draw in this crowd.
• achiang 7y ago
  Google+ failed, but it begat Google Photos which is not a failure. obDisclosure: I'm a Googler, but joined way after G+ both launched and failed.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• the-rc 7y ago
  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.
• exabrial 7y ago
  Two things in my opinion: * Made it hard to "post something on someone's wall" * Terrible redesign after redesign
• rchaud 7y ago
  The "Non-organic growth" section covers Google+'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. Because of this, my Gmail contacts could see the comments I'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'd watched and commented on. Now, I don'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.
  • sverige 7y ago
    This was the moment that I ditched Gmail and made my first vanity domain for email. I have a few Gmail accounts now, but they are separated: one for Maps, one for YouTube, etc. I don't use any of them for actual email.
• andrewl 7y ago
  Google engineer Steve Yegge said: 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'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: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me. The full Yegge rant is at: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
  • hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    While I agree with much of what Yegge said in the post, I think it's extremely far fetched to say that Google+ failed because it was lacking an API when there are 50 other more likely reasons you could point to. Forget understanding platforms, at the time Google fundamentally didn't understand social.
    • gist 7y ago
      The saying 'camel is a horse made by a committee' applies to this situation. There was almost certainly no base creative drive when creating the actual product. Most things that end up being good are driven by someone who is viewed as somewhat crazy but has enough power or force to get what they want and/or steam roll others. Not to mention I am sure they are confusing smarts with luck. The decision makers think of themselves as where they are because they are really smart and less lucky and opportunistic.
      • zepto 7y ago
        Camels are much more robust than horses.
        • Tempest1981 7y ago
• jeffdavis 7y ago
  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. However, it didn't do what Google wanted. It didn't capture my attention for hours and get me to engage with all kinds of corporate marketing and ads. It didn't teach Google anything about me (to be used to sell me stuff later) that it didn't already know. We know with social media, we are the product, not the customer. So Google+ didn't fail, we failed. I was a great customer of G+, but I guess I wasn't a very good product.
• docker_up 7y ago
  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'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. There was zero sense of privacy and they tried to shove that down my throat, and I vomited it out of my system.
• wazoox 7y ago
  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 "engaged users" group, it was fantastic.
• nobrains 7y ago
  Google Plus failed because of the following reasons: 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't make sense to make Google Plus invite only. You are just limiting the growth of your product. It was dumb. 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't be able to know about my lego and arduino posts, and they wouldn'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). 3) Real Name Why try to go this route? I just didn't understand. Maybe requirements from higher-higher up? 4) Slow UI While the UI looked good, I am not sure how good of an experience was it. It was definetly SLOW. All they had to do was to make a facebook clone. Then slowly polish it.
  • ramses0 7y ago
    As an outside observer: Real Name was a play at true identity management. There are two true identity managers currently out there: LinkedIn for business, and Facebook for personal. No other sites have a larger penetration of "socially validated" / "web of trust" connected with real names, pictures, and some kinds of "social/semi-public" activity. Twitter, Yahoo, etc. have tons of "CoolPerson5583" but correspondingly fewer "true identities" with mutual friends, interaction between members, etc (counter-examples welcome!). This correspondingly increases the value of "true identity" accounts. 100 twitter accounts could be 100 robots all following each other. 100 facebook accounts tied to pretty much any "real-ish" person pretty regularly will get you ~100 real people on the back-end. I'm aware of certain people who may have 2-3 semi-active "alternate" facebook accounts (ie: friends-only v. semi-professional, friends-only v. business-related, friends-only v. alternate-group/identity), but facebook accounts are "more important" than twitter accounts because of the _value_ of the social proof/social connections between "real people" vs. "anonymous speech" or "anonymous acquaintances". A facebook account with very few people in your social circle "vouching for it" would rightfully be greeted with suspicion. A facebook account is very difficult to "take over", as with a sufficient number of connections, your identity in facebook is directly related to who you're connected to in your social network. (these statement also apply to LinkedIn). You simply _cannot_ create/recreate a new facebook or linkedin account in the same way you can create a new twitter account or spotify account. People _KNOW_ you on linkedin/facebook, and even if you "rotate" your account, you'd just end up in the same "slot" in the social network. However on twitter, if I were to make "userfoo123" and "userbar456", those two users could have wildly different personalities/actions/social-circles, etc much more easily than having two accounts on facebook or to accounts on linkedin. GMail/email accounts are sometimes another proxy for "real identity" b/c they are often associated with a particular individual, contain materially sensitive information, and are kindof rough to re-create in case you wanted to change your identity (logins/password resets, etc.). However, gmail/email accounts are much more prone to personal identity management and not _social_ identity management (ie: you log into your bank account w/ your gmail address, but you don't usually directly post cat-memes with your gmail address). Identity management is a tricky thing. They didn't want to be what twitter turned in to... they wanted to be "the white pages / phone book" and steal that job from Facebook/LinkedIn.
• stevehiehn 7y ago
  People opted into other social media platforms. G+ forced it on you one day. I think many people resented that.
• yaro014 7y ago
  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. If they would just fiddle with YouTube they might get into trouble but now they've tested everything they needed and rolled it to other products. Google+ was never meant to be Facebook replacement.
• dredmorbius 7y ago
  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. G+ failed for multiple reasons, despite being successful in numerous particulars. I miss it, though I don't regret its passing. As with other criticisms, this one is on point in noting that the failures were of leadership (and all the way up the stack: Bradley, Vic, Larry, Eric), and architectural. Site mechanics (good points by Talin), unreliable messaging, and the "let's cram this down everyone's throats" elements all left a very bitter taste. What Talin omits in particular (though it's alluded to briefly) was the extent to which Google directly fought many of Google+'s biggest enthusiasts, with #nymwars (the Real Names policy), noted, being only one of the most notable instances. I'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's annointed "TCs" (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. Another element creating tremendous distrust was Google's repeated ridiculous statements as to the site'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: https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on... Later 2018/2019 analysis of G+ Communities further cemented these findings. This also showed the huge value of regularly contributed, fresh, relevant content to success, over raw subscriber counts. Post recency was a far bigger prediction of other engagement (comments, +1s, reshares) than subscribers. See: https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%2B_Communities#Google.2B_Community_Characteristics_and_Membership https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%... 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.
• oneshot908 7y ago
  I was an IC6 at Google when Google+ launched... 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's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door. 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'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 "googly." Finally, there was "Real Names." 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 "Real Names" happened and people stopped asking for invites overnight. That's the moment for me when the tide turned against this thing. I really liked the initial Google+ UI personally, but the UI ran head-on into the nonsensical "Kennedy" 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 "Kennedy" in a tiny font you'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. 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.
  • Nican 7y ago
    The "Kennedy" comment really made me giggle. I have some dislike for some trends of applications addining great amounts of white space. I have to agree that the interface, and the "Real Names" requirements were the two biggest hurdles for me to even to start to like Google+. I really liked the concept of circles, but whenever I did get around to using the social network, it never felt as social and engaging as Twitter. Even when I did find an intersting discussion, it was hard to keep track of replies. Reddit/HNews/Twitter have a tree-like structure for the comments, but Google+ was mostly flat, and hard to keep track of any debate. I would lose interest on Google+ as soon as I tried to read a comment thread, and close the application altogether.
• devit 7y ago
  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. At the time, Google had much more goodwill than today and there's a chance people would have used it just so they could use Google instead of Facebook.
  • unreal37 7y ago
    Trying to use your dominance in one space (search, or browsers, say) to actively steal data from a competitor (scrape Facebook!) with the intention to destroy that competitor is something lawyers have wet dreams about. I mean, Facebook would have destroyed them in court.
    • kragen 7y ago
      It's a real problem that Facebook users don't have a way to download their own Facebook data.
    • devit 7y ago
      I think it would have been important enough for Google to be worth fighting no matter the cost, since it would have been the only viable way of replacing Facebook. The user would be consenting, initiating and running the procedure on his own machine, so there's a plausible argument that it's fine. Regarding the antitrust argument, you could also argue that Facebook is a monopoly in social networks and that preventing such a data transfer is anticompetitive.
• habosa 7y ago
  How about asking the other question: what made anyone think it would succeed? Facebook was already dominant and Google+ offered nothing really compelling besides a half baked circles/groups thing that took forever to manage. Google had no special social insight, just big-company confidence and a lot of engineers and dollars.
• airnomad 7y ago
  It died because Facebook was better. As simple as that.
• scotty79 7y ago
  My experience of Google plus was following HN circle or sth only to have birthdays of a lot of people I don't know littering my calendar. I never bothered to clean it up. I think they are no longer there.
• feral 7y ago
  I am completely convinced the problem was the invite-only launch, as others have said; let me explain why I think this: Facebook used its invite-only (campus-only, .edu only) natural to build status. However, a college campus is a dense subgraph of the overall human social network. People in college are socially interacting with mostly other people in their college. 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. 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. This makes almost everyones' first use experience suck. A B2C product where everyones first use experience sucks is dead on arrival. I remember discussing this at the time. It seemed like madness to me. (I was doing a PhD studying social graphs.) My first tweet on twitter, from 2010, is about Google Buzz (a preceding social product): https://twitter.com/fergal_reid/status/8974231887 https://twitter.com/fergal_reid/status/8974231887 "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." 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'm reminded of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/918/ https://xkcd.com/918/ I would love to hear the inside story here and learn how this was actually weighed up, or that I was wrong.
• pbuzbee 7y ago
  I think Google+ failed first and foremost because there wasn't any reason to switch. First, it didn'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't offer anything fundamentally different from Facebook: it was very similar, just with far fewer people to talk to. Second, Google+ wasn't cool. Most successful non-niche social networks seem to grow from young people first: young people enjoy having an online space that's separate from older friends/family. Then, as the network becomes more popular, older folks join. This is loosely the trend we'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/or unique. Google+ wasn't very cool or unique: it seemed to target everyone at all once. 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't any compelling reason to use the network. (I'm a Googler, but my opinions are my own)
  • usrusr 7y ago
    > there wasn't any reason to switch. And a big reason not to switch: the big feature that Facebook has which Google could not possibly replicate is that it's not the same company that has control over all the data I type into the web search box. It's bad enough how much data my web search of choice gets, it's bad enough how much data my social media network of choice gets, but combined it would be worse than the sum of its parts. It's incredibly easy to be data-conscious when all you have to to is not take active action to migrate from Facebook to Google and I believe that many people who would never lift a finger to control their data are still more than willing to factor data into their decisions if it's not inconveniencing them. Similar problems are faced by Bing and Alexa, why would I want to invite Microsoft or Amazon even deeper into my life than they already are?
  • shearskill 7y ago
    Oddly enough kids are using GDocs for messaging in school and during study sessions, etc. Not something to build a network around since they are used as ephemeral ad hoc chat spaces.
• asicsp 7y ago
  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. These days, I'm reluctant to use any free Google product, their lifetime is uncertain
• esimov 7y ago
  When Facebook will fail?
  • rahuldottech 7y ago
    Not anytime soon. Tech folks understand the privacy and ethical implications. Good luck explaining that to the layperson. In many developing countries, FB is how many, if not most people get all their news and interact with family and friends. Can't take that away. Because there's no real alternative to it.
• miguelmota 7y ago
  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.
• unsignedint 7y ago
  Actually, I still miss Google+. It was one of the few places I could have meaningful conversation about topics. 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 'pubilc' I rarely see anyone outside of my group interacting with me. I guess the closest major one right now is Twitter. Google+ was certainly hitting some sweetspot between Twitter and Facebook for me.
• CommieBobDole 7y ago
  I think most of the damage from the "real names" 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'd previously signed up with anything that didn't look like a "real name", in many cases locking them out of their entire Google account. And then shortly after that, having learned nothing, they started hunting down and banning accounts that appeared to be for businesses, since their "Google+ for business" offering wasn't ready yet. By the time it was, nobody wanted to put their business on Google+ anymore. Finally, after it was already dead (but they didn'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. Google+ is the demarcation between the old Google that consistently did amazing things and the new Google that, well, mostly doesn't.
  • lone_haxx0r 7y ago
    I remember when Youtube comments were tanks and stickmen.
  • irrational 7y ago
    Maybe the + doesn't mean what we thought it meant. Google + Evil
    • Karunamon 7y ago
      I’d prefer we reserve evil for things that actually hurt people out of malice, not poor product design. Otherwise that term becomes useless.
      • SkyBelow 7y ago
        While talking about the designs of villains is a bit out of scope of the original topic, I find the best bad guys are those who are evil not out of some concept of general malice but instead pursuing some perhaps even agreeable goal with poor implementation and disregard for the harms caused.
• knorker 7y ago
  "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." If you think vicg made only 10x an L5 salary then I have bad news for you. One day I'd like to hear the real reason he left.
• waylandsmithers 7y ago
  The only thing that ever gave it legitimacy to me was the fact that Linus would write posts there.
• dfps 7y ago
  Why did they end it? Was it losing money? In some ways it seemed superior to the other giants, plus it was tied to most peoples' google accounts. Why didnt they just add advertisements, paid posts, and clean up the ui?
• radley 7y ago
  Google’s consumer branding makes a lot more sense if you replace “Google” with “Smurf”. Smurf+, Smurf Assistant, "Hey Smurf...", Smurf Home Hub...
• SteveParker60 7y ago
  popup covers the whole article.
• qbaqbaqba 7y ago
  Medium is unreadable on mobiles.
• hartator 7y ago
  > You’ve reached the end of your free member preview for this month. Become a member now for $5/month to read this story and get unlimited access to all of the best stories on Medium. You have to pay to read Medium now?
  • smitop 7y ago
    Most articles are free, but some articles are designated by their authors as member articles. Authors get paid when members read member articles.
• hartator 7y ago
  Google+ implementation was also particularly bad. With plenty of bugs in the frontend. Like it was a pain to use and wasn't pleasant to look at. And no one understood what a circle is.
• swivelmaster 7y ago
  This is a classic case of smart people jumping head-first into a problem with only a superficial understanding of what makes something successful. I'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 "We're going to FIX mobile gaming!" And then they would fail spectacularly because their mental model of the problem didn't accurately reflect reality. 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'd love to see some commentary from someone who worked on that, but my impression was that they didn't understand that the FB platform's extreme ease of use and developer-friendliness was what made it work well, and that the platform's scale was a value-add on top of that.
• inlined 7y ago
  I was there at Google when G+ launched. I think there were a few other initial issues that prevented it from landing: 1. The real name policy was draconian. Leadership didn’t listen to internal or external outcries for far too long. 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. 3. Circles were frankly a chore to manage. 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.
• acdha 7y ago
  I think there'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 (“<rando> 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. By the time they started doing basic UX work most people I knew had already either uninstalled it or been trained to ignore it. 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'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't bother”.
• asdf21 7y ago
  It's legit just not caring about customers. - Want to keep using RSS? Fuck you. - Want to keep using Google Wave? Fuck you. - Want support on your adsense account? Lol, nope. - Account got banned or limited inappropriately? Fuck you. - Want to keep your YouTube and Google accounts separate? Fuck you. - Want to get your domain whitelisted in Gmail? Fuck you. I could go on and on.. They simply do not care about their customers.
  • Andrex 7y ago
    A customer is someone who pays for a service, and I'm not sure the listed examples qualify.
    • dna_polymerase 7y ago
      People keep repeating this bullshit, but it is wrong. People using their services, albeit free of charge, are their customers. They are the ones who click on ads. They are the ones who drive most of their revenue. Everything around search serves the same purpose: keep people happy on their platform so they keep using search and click ads.
  • JimDabell 7y ago
    Some companies try to disrupt markets, but Google tends to disrupt their customers. Not sure that makes sense.
  • chrshawkes 7y ago
    I've personally known this for a decade and I'm glad people are finally getting pissed off with Google's arbitrary stranglehold on the rules and regulations of the WWW. You either play by their rules or you go out of business. Their rules suck though. AMP can go straight to hell.
  • georgeecollins 7y ago
    I also think they have issues with developers because they abandon technologies that they push for a while and constantly break backward compatibility. A lot of times they are doing this with a good technical intent. But its like they are telling you that you need to invest in retooling your apps for their platforms. If it isn't worth it to you-- too bad so sad.
• OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago
  Ok, we'll ask you again later. Ok, we'll ask you again later. Ok, we'll ask you again later. Ok, we'll ask you again later.
• joedevon 7y ago
  From the consumer perspective, Google+ failed because it sucked.
• johnwheeler 7y ago
  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.
• yongjik 7y ago
  I'm not a social person, so maybe I wasn't a target audience of Google+, but for all its flaws I actually loved asymmetrical following model. That means I can "follow" a friend of college friend whom I might have met twice, just because they say something interesting, without wondering "Wait do I still count as their friend? What if they remember me and I really don't? It's gonna be awkward..." Similarly these kind-of-friends can follow me because they find me interesting and I'll feel no pressure to follow them back. Half of the time I get a friend request in Facebook, I don't really know the person (but I have reasons to expect that the person thinks they "know" me) so it feels awkward either to accept or decline. Just my two cents.
• rafiki6 7y ago
  I will agree with the author that FB isn't invulnerable, but IMO Google+ simply wasn'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't anything substantially better from the user's perspective to encourage a shift enmasse. This isn't so much Google+'s failure as a product as it was the astounding success of FB at keeping it's users. Google+ definitely had some cool and interesting features, but people just didn't care. I think a great case study would be to see why MySpace failed to keep it's users and FB got them, and why Google+ couldn't achieve the same critical mass. I think the eventual fracturing of the features of Google+ and migration into other products was a smart move. Here's an example conversation I had at the time with someone about why we should switch over to Google+: Me: It's better! Cool features Friend: Ya but w/e FB already has everyone there...plus those features are meh Me: Ya but privacy! Friend: Let's be real, Google and FB make money the same way...ain't no one's privacy gonna get in the way of that Me: True...
• joe_the_user 7y ago
  G+ failed by not understanding Facebook and by not having any intention of giving disgruntled Facebook users what they wanted. My sense is Facebook in particular brought as many people "online" as did all the previous Internet innovations combined. Essentially, it did this by giving the functionality of previous online communication approaches while minimizing the noise and merging these together into a "real" relationship called "friend". (Facebook didn't do more than email, blogs and chat, it did less but in a way that people wanted). Online data can easily form a stream of bits and bytes each person puts together into a different form. This stream only becomes "a thing", a "document", etc when some group of people all perceive it the same way. Facebook made "friends", "posts" and so-forth into "things". Just as much, human relationships have always had a tension between social-contextual identities and universal identities, between "real" 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's privacy model was broken and inherently broken but it still was key to Facebook's success because it's what people want, what human social interactions assume - ie, you can tell your friends things and they'll remain "secret". It's not true in the real world and it's not true on Facebook but it's what people to believe. And yeah, G+ failed by not understanding any of this. I don't know exactly how many people understood this then aside from Facebook.
• makecheck 7y ago
  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 1/3 of the people. I wasn’t going to “share” things if I thought only one person would see the post. Then there was the bridging. They ruined every service owned by Google by shoehorning direct links to Google+.
• aurizon 7y ago
  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...
• hunter23 7y ago
  I find it ironic that the author is trying to detail core reasons why Google+ failed when they themselves admit they don't use any social media. While I didn'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 "we can make a better version of Facebook". There was no real use case. 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't even use any of the social media tools and they didn't get "social". To them it was some thing you plug on top of an existing product to increase ad revenue. If you don't have the drive and you don't understand your users, you aren't going to build something people want.
  • netwanderer3 7y ago
    That's my thought as well. Google+ seemed like just another "me too" platform. Though Google attempted to steer it into another direction later but it was simply too late by then. What I found hard to believe was that with all the brightest, smartest, most creative people at Google, yet they couldn't figure out a better use case for the platform during all those years? That should have been easy compared to other much harder problems that Google were able to solve successfully. Similarly, if we think about it Yelp really has no rights to be in the small business index/listing/reviews space. Google own two biggest weapons in "Search Engine" and "Maps" and they completely dominate these two markets, so why was Yelp allowed to get to where it is today I'll never understand? I don't know why they still have not done this but if they really want to, Google could easily leverage these two tools plus Google Cloud Platform to turn Google main search page into a Global Store where end users could simply enter a product name into the search box and Google will immediately locate it on Google Maps at various stores near where they are with real time stock availability. Users then can quickly go and pick up the item they want in person at the location they prefer. They don't even have to wait for shipping. Google could develop an easy and intuitive front-end app for small businesses to list their products and update their stock (or use some kinds of tracking technology like beacon), then tie more advanced machine learning and big data analytics features to their Google Cloud Platform for bigger companies that have the needs for such data. This helps reducing much friction and shorten the purchase funnel for end users who are searching to buy a specific product. At the moment, users must navigate through a sea of websites of which are mostly irrelevant, even after finding a potential website users again must find their way around the store to see whether it even carries or has the product in stock. Can't find the right product or zero stock availability? Well too bad, start again from scratch! By reducing these steps, Google can effectively help users save much of their time and quickly locate the product they want right on Google Maps. People do not really care about vendors or companies, they only care about the products as that’s really what they’re looking for. Small businesses will also benefit greatly from features like this one since they won’t have to spend more time and money to locate buyers, now buyers just come to them directly. Google Search + Maps have just become a global retail store overnight.
• bpyne 7y ago
  I remember that my wife and I were late to Facebook, having been convinced by our daughter'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.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• TracePearson 7y ago
  "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?" Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat... The greater issue to me doesn't seem to be who can beat Facebook but rather, what's going to keep Facebook from buying up any real threat that's not backed by one of the big 5 tech giants.
• flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
  My biggest qualms with G+ was that it was constantly changing... I would log in every few weeks/months and something was different. G+: Hey, check out this new feature! Me: But I uhhh... G+: Oh, and we implemented this too, isn't it great!? Me: Well sure but... G+: And we removed that one feature that you did actually kind of use, it's now this. 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. G+ was pivoting to a fault since day 1 imho.
• ajcarpy2005 7y ago
  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.
• gitgud 7y ago
  To me the name sucked, google+ is equivalent to more Google. It doesn't really make sense why they choose that name, seems lazy and boring... 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't remember anyone being excited about it in my social network)...
• iabacu 7y ago
  Google+ leadership was not trying to build a product and grow a userbase. They were concerned about driving metrics, and only tangentially building a product. 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.
• efitz 7y ago
  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. (I can’t find the link right now but will update when I do)
• lorenzorhoades 7y ago
  The OP has obviously never used Instagram, which for my generation is much more popular than Facebook. Almost every reason listed for Google+'s failure, is a feature of instagrams massive success.
• sunstone 7y ago
  The killer for me was that I thought the "circles" I created were mine. I didn't realize, and assume Google wanted me not to realize, that the people I put in circles could see each other. 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.