Didn't know that, it's cool to learn about it.
About Twitter and FB being on a minefield I agree, but I don't think that will lead to any serious consequences for them, because there's almost no political will to make things right and that happens because the voters themselves (those FB and Twitter users) have almost no interest in how those companies reached their present size. In the end any skilled politician can smell that there's no sense in going to war against a company (or against a communication medium) that consumes at least 3 or 4 hours per day, on average, of their voters' time, it's like a US politician going to war against television in the 1960s, backed when TV had just emerged, it would be public opinion suicide.
Retrospectively I still do think that Page had the right idea to try and force Social (back at that time I also thought it as a crazy idea), like I said, I think that he had sensed that Search will be of almost no use in a world where the internet/web is not represented by websites anymore. I do agree though that even as seen from the outside Page could have done a much better job of getting the Google employees behind him and behind his idea, I think that that wood and arrows metaphor he used was really, really poor and, frankly speaking, quite condescending.
Seeing the FB revenue figures today I can see why he cared, but I think he undermined the long term prospects of the company with this shit quite a bit, and distracted it from more valuable pursuits as well. That's all on him, not on Gundotra.
Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to advertisers, and I don't think Google valued the product highly because of it.
So, where's the actual profit? Or is this all mind control, friend-of-a-friend illuminati stuff that's assumed to make Google want to do this stuff?
Argue the points, or don't bother addressing the writeup. Good grief.
The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing at that time weren't as cheap.
Facebook was the first large practical social network among these where you can actually go and signup an account on your own when it was fully open. And they did it by heavily optimizing their code and hardware. That was a separate challenge, which seemed to me Google was unwilling to take for Orkut or anything social at that time.
That's what I felt was happening as an outsider.
That's doubly false :)
First, all social networks that preceded it (LiveJournal and MySpace were big amongst my peers) had open sign-ups.
Second, Facebook became popular because the sign-up was not open. You needed to have an .edu email address to sign up. This was a feature, as it kept parents and younger siblings off the networks. Having a FB account was a literal right of passage, something you can only get once you go to college. It spread because of that; those were the great days of FB.
Myspace, Friendster, Bebo…
They cut Orkut because Brazilians aren't worth much in advertising. Plain and simple.
I laughed far harder than I should have.
Even today, I think YouTube has a great potential for becoming a better social network, than G+ ever was.
Hell the fact that Snapchat succeeded in growing a credible threat to Facebook with a fraction of the engineering and marketing resources as Google+ should tell you how wrong that strategy was...
Each of the networks grew initially by providing an insanely better experience specific to a subnetwork (FB for alumni networks, Insta for narcissistic hobby photographers with its filters, Snapchat for horny teens who want to send nude pics, or who want to be goofy with its funny face filters...)
There were a few niches where Google+ unintentionally ended up being successful, such as internal to enterprise, and for pro photographers who liked that pictures had an option to be hosted uncompressed. But the vision overall had poor market fit and would never have latched on to a dense enough subnetwork to succeed IMO.
Google Buzz was closer to Twitter, and came and failed before G+ was a thing.
I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.
Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)