A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

I'd actually rather a de-centralised platform. And prefer a glorious feed organiser.

Very simple open comment/status feed APIs would be more beneficial for the community at large with a pub/sub mechanism that was easy to understand and utilise.

Add an RSS feed for a news website, add a Twitter feed, or friend, add a Facebook (channel for a better word), or whatever. Organise these somehow. Integrate privacy controls. This would probably suit a next generation browser rather than an online silo.

Yup, that's a killer. I have people who follow me for personal stuff, a few people who follow me for kayaking stuff, a couple hundred people who apparently follow me for tech/entrepreneurial stuff and some people who follow me for interesting links to French content.

But the tech people have only a limited interest in kayaking, none of the kayaking people care weird French TV series, and so on. So anything I say is going to bore someone. At least Google+ circles make it easy to restrict 99% of the "adorable child" photos to my immediate family. But that only works for those followers I know personally, not the couple hundred strangers who follow me for one reason or another.

How not to be boring, rule 101: Thou shalt not obsess about one's hobbies to people who are not interested.

Twitter works a bit better, because I can have several independent Twitter accounts: one per language that I write in, or one per enthusiasm, or whatever works for me.

But Google+ forces me to publish only that subset of content which is interesting to almost all my followers. And that's very nearly the null set.

Let's do this from first principles.

Twitter was successful early on because they never discouraged multiple, independent, throwaway accounts. Why doesn't Google let you manage an unlimited number of independent and unlinked first-class-citizen profiles under one Google Account, under any name you choose? They can still mine all the data because they know (and keep secret!) that it's all one person. Facebook and Twitter do this too, just with cookies instead of login credentials.

People want to share lots of personal details on their social network. Facebook is wildly successful because they make it easy for people to do so - perhaps to the point of oversharing. Google could have dispensed with the whole "following"/"circles" nonsense and gone with the undirected, two-way-confirmed model (with group support) that doesn't confuse people not familiar with graph theory, or the twitter model of basically casual, unconfirmed, directed-graph subscription, independent of the underlying personal relationship. Either would have been fine - instead, the egghead googlers tried to solve both and ended up solving neither.

Last but not least, pretending that I want Google+ (no, don't "ask me again later" you fucking cunt of a website) to infect all the other important basic utilities of the web that Google's huge pile of cash has bought their way into (YouTube of course first comes to mind, but Maps and Gmail and Search too) is blatantly disrespectful to their only true asset: their users. Even Zuckerberg doesn't pretend like he's doing us that much of a favor when Facebook once-again revises its default privacy controls downward...

It's pretty simple, really. It's super tragic that Google has turned into such a monolith of a Big Company that it can't even execute on a simple vision without tons of management getting involved and figuring out, through endless meetings, how to make every single step of the experience as user-hostile as possible.

It's not like they're incapable of making user-centric experiences anymore. Look at how great Maps is these days, or how Gmail's webmail has become completely untouchable the way Outlook/Exchange or Blackberries were in their heyday - both cases because they did exactly what their customers wanted.

(Aside: Interestingly enough, Apple was doing this for a long time, and now with things like iAds and IAPs and carrier override of my ability to tether my phone, it seems like they are slowly beginning to fail to consider exactly why and how they got to their position as market leader. (The argument could also be made that they are serving multiple masters - carriers/developers versus end-users.) If they continue, as Google has, eventually their customers will be right to leave.)

I imagine it will take a lot of smart Googlers leaving in utter frustration before Google-the-entity finally changes course.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I'm not sure I agree with this.

Apple have had some pretty famous "We know what's best for you" stances in their history - one button mouse, original Mac keyboard with no cursor keys, original iPod only working with Macs, very limited array of products configurations, no licencing of MacOS to non-Apple computers, iPhone apps only available through their app store etc etc. Some of those have eventually changed, but (apart from maybe the iPods being Mac-only) they haven't typically restricted the success of those products.

If anything, the darkest days of their history were probably at the point when they were offering a vast array of products and configurations in an attempt to give users exactly what they thought they wanted.