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-o

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.