Google may have been exaggerating these numbers. From https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expeditin...

> Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds

Is that countint actual use of Google Plus or does that count anything that connects to it (comment boxes, YouTube, etc.).

Hell, the Chromecast screensaver photos are hosted on Google Plus.

Don’t forget that they ran logins and notifications for everything through the Google+ interface and did things to juice the numbers like uncontrollable push notifications every time someone you’d ever exchanged email with joined (hi random person who bought a bookcase on Craigslist!).

The G+ numbers looked suspicious if you ran any sort of public website, where e.g. I saw metrics for referrals or shares at least an order of magnitude lower than Facebook or Twitter.

Wow, really?? In that case, what caused G+ to fail? I was always under the impression that it was due to (low) DAUs.

The Wikipedia article goes on to talk about G+'s very low engagement. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter's engagement rates were somewhere near Facebook's.

> User engagement on Google+ was low compared with its competitors; ComScore estimated that users averaged just 3.3 minutes on the site in January 2012, versus 7.5 hours for Facebook.[22][23]

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B#Growth)

That makes you question if they actually had 300 millions "active" users.

High MAUs doesn't necessarily translate to high DAUs.

Indeed, and high DAUs doesn't translate to a high number of engaged users either. Just a 301 HTTP redirect through a domain as part of a chain can count as DAU and mean nothing.

yeah i visited g+ primarily for the active dev communities oriented around google products. def just once or twice a week and the activity on those "circles" was pretty slow

Slow growth/lack of user traction was what caused Google to pull the plug. Its a similar overarching problem to Twitter, but more of users being disinterested than actively repulsed due to the content the most popular users of said service post...