You could tell, open handed, that people would not be interested in the idea of the product, by the way it was executed, by the undertones of its justification for existence.
It was a product mandated for the sake of a company's bucket list at best. To earn a gold star for trying. To mark off a checkbox.
The whole thing reeked of groupthink, from a mile away. Censored behavior. Courting celebrities. Requiring real names. Activities restrained by pretense. It stank of corporate influence, of lunchtime business meetings, of shareholder concern. Poochie the dog, rastafied by 10% or so.
Nothing about it felt natural. Everyone has to wear clothes. No cursing please. Place your cigarette in the appropriate receptacle.
Worse still, all things were clearly designed to funnel back into some other thing at Google that was more impotant to the bottom line. Endorsements, trending interests, who's reading what, written by who, and so forth.
It wasn't designed to tickle the user. None of that is why people come to the internet and keep coming back. Not regular people.
You could tell that the people invloved in crafting the reason for Google Plus' existence were people who pay their taxes. Who drive safely, even if they drive expensive cars. Who spend their lives trapped inside a ribbed condom. Yeah, it's a condom, but it's a ribbed condom. So much better!
Facebook is also guilty of many of these sins, but it's what they do, it's ALL they do, and they don't get in the way of people behaving badly, or at least not in ways that would preclude them from just trying to have fun on a website they don't actually need to use. And that's where Google really crossed the line, by trying to needle people into jumping on the Google Plus bandwagon, and then by telling them to sit all proper and cross-legged too.