It's not that they didn't take their users' sensitivities into account; it's more that google plainly doesn't give a damn what their users want. Where users as

It's not that they didn't take their users' sensitivities into account; it's more that google plainly doesn't give a damn what their users want. Where users asking to have their activity on youtube and gmail and photos all tied together (and public!)? I don't think many where. Did users want youtube videos to disappear off the corporate site (marked private) because the documentation person said no when she was asked to add google+ to her paid google apps account? Probably not. Did they think their users wanted another fb-style "privacy" settings (oh look, yet another thing is unexpectedly public, and we redesigned the privacy settings again to make it even harder to understand and to make things private.) Viz the fiasco with buzz, and with google+ name-search. You could either believe that pms in google are so stupid they don't know some users have people they really do not want to be contacted by, or you have to find an alternate explanation. And the one I've settled on is Google doesn't give a shit. To be fair, this theory also accords the fact that google's users aren't you and me; they're advertisers. I mean, Occam's Razor can lead you astray, but in this case I doubt it. The most obvious explanation also explains the majority of Google's behavior. First, Google executives saw facebook not sharing information such as friends lists and heard hints of facebook building a search engine far before this was public knowledge. They'd get this through friends -- the industry is a small world -- and also hiring patterns. Then they saw facebook refusing to let google crawl most of their site. Pants were shit. Founders were scared. Google decided that they needed to compete directly with facebook, and that having their own social network was more important than anything else. Aspie computer nerds who've never talked to a normal human being or enjoyed an easy conversation with a MOS where put in charge of social features, with orders to copy facebook or else. Users where forced to use Google+, whether they wanted to or not. Bonuses were tied to Google+ performance. Hell, someone inside Google thought "plussing" doesn't make you sound like a tool. And the rest follows.