Fundamental problem: social networks with no-one on them are not fun and not sticky.
Fundamental problem 2: if anyone can read what you're writing, it's not a social network, it's a blog. So you can't just let anyone see what people are writing.
The way FB handled that in the early days was that by default, people in the same university network could see your status etc. I don't remember exactly what they could and couldn't do but the point is that they created a semi-privileged circle of people with some access based on a pre-made group that people would be familiar with - fellow students at the same university.
That gave people a network from day 1 in what felt like a controlled way. Also, as noted, they started with a desirable closed group that people wanted to belong to.
They would later expand to other Ivy league schools — aka networks — one by one, rather than simultaneously, as a way to slow their growth.
I imagine an unintended side effect of this growth strategy was the sense of FOMO that it engendered among university students that had heard about but couldn’t join the exclusive/elusive Facebook, unlike the other social networks like Friendster, Hi5 etc.
For each network on their expansion list, Zuck & team would furiously scrape the student directory to seed the new network with plausible student info.
It wasn't just that. At the beginning, you had to be at an Ivy League. And that was the problem, G+ was invite only among a bunch of nerds, whereas FB was invite only among people who network for a living.
If anything, the real distinction is that a network for college students is appealing to teenagers, who are the perfect audience for social media. A network for adults doesn't draw in this crowd.
Unfortunately this increased the barrier to entry at launch too, which for social networks whose value is tied to users generating media is a cardinal sin.
Compared to that, nobody cared about a Facebook ripoff with a different UI and none of the network effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail
"after considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, a figure that was preposterous compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time.[3]"
"On 1 April 2005, exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB, advertising it as 2GB plus"
The sample of the news from these times:
https://betanews.com/2005/04/01/gmail-storage-to-reach-2gb-a...
FB wasn't restricted within your likely friends group (all students at particular schools were made eligible at the same time).
1. Exponentially more space in a market where single or double digit megabytes was the norm. GMail's original pitch was that you never had to delete an email, and that you could always find them with search.
2. It was one of the first web apps. It was dynamic in a way few sites were then. Asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and Web 2.0 were still new concepts.
A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal.
That might be compelling content, compelling connections, or a mix of the two. A cultivated and exclusive club, as with the Haevard Facebook, or early Usenet, has appeal. It's the opening up to the world which kills that initial growth appeal.
Google+ would have done far better to extend the beta period, possibly by years, and shake out its fundamental architectural flaws.
I disagree and think it's 100% the reason it failed.
> A social network's initial frowth phase is completely predicated on it being a space people want to join, and that is accomplished by its delivering value and appeal.
But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't. And since a social network is only useful if all your friends are on it, people never got into the habit of using it. Why use a social network without your friends? It's not like GMail where it's still useful even if your friends aren't on it.
I can tell you personally that I was excited to get the invite to Google+, only to lose the excitement when only 3 of my friends were on it. By the time Google+ became available to everyone, it was too late. The excitement was gone.
> A cultivated and exclusive club, as with the Haevard Facebook, or early Usenet, has appeal.
The exclusivity of Harvard Facebook succeeded because social media was still in its infancy at the time. Most people didn't have access to the WWW in their pocket yet. Early Usenet had appeal because the Internet itself was still only being used by techies and college students.
Most people didn't hear about it. You can ask people on the street. They sure know facebook. Excitement is not a good way to motivate people to move platforms, in general (despite the niche cases like Fyre Festival which are relatively small). Maybe they should have gotten some celebrity support? Otherwise the excitement wasn't mainstream. G+ needed mainstream users.
> But people did want to join Google+, but they couldn't
That doesnt explain the lack of participation a year later. Nobody wanted G+ because they didn't need it. Even if it gave some benefit (which it couldn't) it didn't join with their existing Social Media data making a higher barrier.
Lots of people did. But then they couldn't get an account. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-05-20%202...
The second spike in the trends graph corresponds with the open access public announcement. Interest spiked, but did not sustain.
It's the lack of sustain that hurt G+ in the end. And much of that was due to a very raw early release -- no search, little content, and very muddled concepts, many never really fixed.
With Google+, invites were more or less random, so in a group of 5 friends maybe 3 got one and 2 didn't. Were the 3 people who got invites supposed to just drop their other 2 friends? Obviously people aren't going to do that.
People do like things that are exclusive, but they want to exclude outsiders, not their friends.
Expanding beyond this, especially to Google's other natural affinity group, advertisers and marketers, did far more harm than good to the service IMO.
The actual invite-only period only lasted a few months -- it was general-access by late September 2011:
https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/tech/web/google-plus-public/i...
Facebook's closed period lasted years.
By the time it opened up to everyone, nobody cared anymore. I can't believe somebody thought it would be a good idea to restrict access to a product that depends on network effects to succeed.