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 particul

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.