A simple way Google could have avoided fucking up Google+

To understand why RSS was not enabled, we have to look at Larry Page and his rise to CEO. Larry Page became CEO at a time when Facebook was getting lots of attention for what was supposed to be nothing but lots of data. He believed Facebook lacked intelligence to analyze data, but he also envied Facebook's position of harnessing all sorts of data and doing it all without doing a single thing about interoperability.

So he established two trends at Google: kill interoperability and focus on chess pieces that will strengthen Google's position (killing interoperability was one way). RSS went out the window because then people would not join G+. G.Reader went out the window because there was no vision for the data it was gathering and no vision for how you could use it even though it was a major chess piece that Google could have leveraged in multiple ways, nevermind the subscriber base.

I believe for G+ to succeed it had to be 100% opt-in for every single feature that was made available. Btw, I have been forced to join G+ so often that I have dumped participation in nearly everything that requires it from Hangouts to Android App reviews.

Also, there needs to be vision for G+ other than to be a copycat of Facebook. I have thought on multiple occasions that to copy or compete with someone is to shoot yourself in the foot just because the other person also has a shot foot. To really copy someone, you need to copy vision. This way you don't copy flaws too.

Doesn't Google+ have "circles" which lets you decide who you want to share with? Couldn't that take care of the above issue?

Contrast with Maps: Maps made Android. Maps is the embodiment of customer delight. And now that Maps is dominant, it just keeps improving with every release.

It is an execution failure.

> publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of

On google+, it's the publisher who decides which people are in which circle, not the reader who decides in which circle he wants to be (and circle names and person list are totally private).

So, if you publish to a circle rather than publicly, only people you added in circle will see your content. It's not guaranteed they actually care about it, and those who care about it and you don't know won't be able to see the content.

As others have mentioned, circles are meant for privacy (I want to publish this to my family, that to my close friends), not to separate content (I want to publicly talk about politics, I want to publicly talk about cats).