Why Google+ Failed

FB wasn't restricted within your likely friends group (all students at particular schools were made eligible at the same time).

G+ failed for multiple reasons, despite being successful in numerous particulars. I miss it, though I don't regret its passing.

As with other criticisms, this one is on point in noting that the failures were of leadership (and all the way up the stack: Bradley, Vic, Larry, Eric), and architectural.

Site mechanics (good points by Talin), unreliable messaging, and the "let's cram this down everyone's throats" elements all left a very bitter taste.

What Talin omits in particular (though it's alluded to briefly) was the extent to which Google directly fought many of Google+'s biggest enthusiasts, with #nymwars (the Real Names policy), noted, being only one of the most notable instances.

I'll also distinguish G+ fans from Google fanbois -- the latter were (and remain) toxic to the company. Thos includes many (though not all) of Google's annointed "TCs" (top contributors), many represented among the G+ Google+ Help community, where active frustration of efforts to help users and groups migrate off G+ in its final months and days was a constant factor.

Another element creating tremendous distrust was Google's repeated ridiculous statements as to the site's success, openly mocked in the press. In early 2015 I proved by a random sampling of profiles that a minuscule fraction of the billions of registered profiles were posting publicly on a monthly basis, methods and results confirmed several months later, on a far larger sample, by Stone Temple Consulting:

https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on...

Later 2018/2019 analysis of G+ Communities further cemented these findings. This also showed the huge value of regularly contributed, fresh, relevant content to success, over raw subscriber counts. Post recency was a far bigger prediction of other engagement (comments, +1s, reshares) than subscribers.

See:

https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...

That Google, a notoriously metrics-driven firm, could not or would not credibly analyze or report such data was a huge blow to its general credibility.

I pretty much stopped using it early on when I realized organizing everyone into the various "circles" was a huge undertaking. At the time you HAD to put people into circles and I had a lot of people from Twitter to import.. so I gave up and just didn't use it.

From my perspective, I think partitioning the Google+ team into their own Dark Tower with their own super-healthy cafeteria that was for them and their executives alone was the biggest problem. IMO this even foreshadows separating off Google Brain from the rest of Google and giving them resources not available to anyone else. Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.

Then there was the changing story of the 2011 bonus. When I hired in, we were all told our 2011 bonus would be tied to the success of Google+. That's a fantastic way to rally your co-workers, except... Once they launched Google+, the Google+ Eliterati (so to speak) changed their minds and announced that any Google+ bonus was for Google+ people alone. Maximum emotionally intelligent genius IMO. Now your own co-workers have been burned. Also not very "googly."

Finally, there was "Real Names." The week of its launch everyone I knew wanted an invite and I used up every single one of them and continued to do so as more were made available to me. Then "Real Names" happened and people stopped asking for invites overnight. That's the moment for me when the tide turned against this thing.

I really liked the initial Google+ UI personally, but the UI ran head-on into the nonsensical "Kennedy" initiative wherein some brilliant designer seemed to decide that since monitors are now twice the size they used to be, they should add twice the whitespace to show the same amount of information as on a much smaller screen. Subversives within the company took to posting nearly blank sheets of printer paper on walls with the single word "Kennedy" in a tiny font you'd only see if you got close to the things. That said, my godawful company man manager would repeatedly proclaim how beautiful he thought the Kennedy layout was in our office for all to hear whenever they updated GMail or Search to use it.

Of course, there are other reasons beyond my tiny perspective here, but I did have a front row seat for this and it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.

Most people are conservative like you. Your sheer numbers are why crossing the chasm is so important for the long-term survival of a new offering.