I don’t remember many particularly egregious failures in UI and product design. In my experience it was well designed, but served no purpose whatsoever given that it was almost a complete clone of Facebook features, thus no reason for any of my facebook addicted friends to start using it, thus no reason for me to use it, thus dead in the water due to marketing fail and not product. Maybe I missed some specific UX or design issues that you are referring to?

I do agree that there was a missed opportunity to integrate their other awesome products you mentioned. But to me even with those integrated Google+ would have needed a raison d’etre that was substantially different than facebook.

G+'s interface may have been clean and minimalist, but its features were known for being too confusing to navigated and manage, especially the circles - its core function. Finding, linking to, mentioning other people, the +1 button; you had to experiment for a good amount of time to get G+. That isn't attractive to normal people.

At the same time, the minimalism pervaded the rest of the platform. Instead of giving its users reason to spend time on G+, the site seemed to expect for people to entertain themselves. As such, there was little that drove more activity, connected people, and gave reason to spend time to understand all the features.

One thing I misremembered. There was a serious issue with marketing. They didn't open up to the public for several months. By that time a lot of the hype died down.

The "Real Name" policy at the start was a huge mistake that hurt them. Early adopters were overwhelmingly digital natives who immediately felt the product wasn't for them.

See, that's an interesting angle. Facebook had to stick with real names because they were trying to become the default source of personal identity online. (and basically succeeded) But with real identity comes a whole host of problems.

If Google had pivoted 180 degrees and offered up a full featured social network with pseudonyms and, like, one other twist so that it wasn't just Myspace, then there's a reason to care about Google+. LinkedIn is facebook for professional identity... There have to be other identities not shown on Facebook that google could have gone after.

They made a complete farce of marketing it as it wasn't initially like Facebook. Facebook connects to people you know or are connected to. Google+ seemed more a Usenet 2.0 in connecting based on interests, especially with things like circles, whether you knew people or not. A few friends joined really early in beta and thought it was great.

So when I got to joining what did it present? Welcome - connect to some famous people. Now add your friends. Not one mention of interests, and I'm not sure they even mentioned circles. So everyone joining was being presented a picture of Facebook.

I didn't last long.

When it launched I had several friends on g+ that were not on Facebook. Facebook already had a bad rep, but Google was still cool. The circles were a great idea. I didn't see any problems with the ui either.

But there was simply not much to do, contrary to what you'd expect with all the other Google services available.

“Friends on G+ that weren’t on Facebook” <== this was an opportunity

I was still very high on Facebook kool aid at that time. It may have had a bad rep to some people, but this sentiment was years away from reaching people like me.

Note that I am about as much of a Facebook insider as possible without actually having worked there. I personally know most of their top execs, Zuck interviewed me in 2007, turned down a PM offer to join Bebo but stayed close with a number of them for years. I would have loved to be filthy rich with those options, but if I had joined I would feel guilty for the destruction I contributed to.

i haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but google+ made it difficult to join in the beginning. it was invite only or something else limiting like that where you couldn't join even if you wanted to unless you had an invite. i remember it being quite a long time after their initial buzz before they opened it up. it made me lose interest.

Not sure if it was intentional but you mentioned an earlier failed Google social effort - buzz.

In fact including wave buzz and orkut, Google had to date at least 4 abandoned forays into the social market.

I'd go so far as to posit Google:social::Microsoft:mobile