You can replicate the network with a reduced feature-set. Be something else entirely (e.g. Whatsapp, Instagram etc.), stay lean and grow. After that you can bra

You can replicate the network with a reduced feature-set. Be something else entirely (e.g. Whatsapp, Instagram etc.), stay lean and grow. After that you can branch out or be bought by Facebook in fear of you branching out. I get your point, though. If I were Google I would have started the whole Google+ thing as a publishing platform for businesses and/or regular news publishers and bloggers, using some benefits within the search to lure them in. Facebook clearly pisses them of as they try to squeeze them. That way Google could have gotten some content first. Next push some commenting-system on top of it (as they did) but without the Feed-Posts appearing there and all the other crap. They already had Hangouts/Voice and Picasa, why did they even need to cripple all these services. They could instead have made Google+ a lightweight identity services as they promoted it.