Unfortunately, the evident intensity of their commitment did not correlate with the wisdom of their decisions. Perhaps it was inversely correlated, because boy were there a lot of terrible decisions in that product.

- what was the situation around the shutdown? Was the whole thing knowingly on life support and just waiting for the right excuse, or...?

- was the shutdown effectively coincidental, in the sense of "ok everyone's making a scene about $random_thing, kill it" (where $random_thing just happened to be what the internet interpreted as a data leak)

- did the data get purged from the very last backup, or does it still get used to finetune improve AI models etc?

- does G+ still exist in its original form anymore? Trying to visit https://plus.google.com/apps/activities still works, but only in the form of Google Currents, and visiting via an old Google Apps (yep :D) account that's somehow still eking along (for how long???) also works, but that's Currents too. It looks/feels just about identical to G+ though (https://imgur.com/a/rqvF03t).

Is it being used for education or something?

The big fear was that Facebook would do email and it'd not be as good as Gmail but everyone would use it because it was social, that Facebook could even do maps or web search, same thing. So G+ became seen as a "save the company" hail mary move.

After some years passed Facebook rapidly reached middle age, their attempt at email sort of flopped, they didn't launch dozens of new products and the ones they did launch didn't replicate their earlier success, and the fear ebbed away. Meanwhile the G+ product managers (mostly Vic Gundotra) had burned a lot of bridges by forcing G+ into everything. Whilst Larry/Sergey/Eric were afraid of Facebook he had absolute power because they felt only G+ could save the firm. When it became clear that was an over-reaction he lost his protection and was out.

My phone contacts are still screwed up because I made the catastrophic blunder of joining a public “circle”, and google decided that everybody in it must be my best friend so it imported them into my address book.

So even today, I’ll try to send a message to an actual friend and it’ll give me the drop down of sixteen Mike’s to choose from. 15 I’ve never heard of (thought their names are getting familiar over the years) or interacted with and somewhere randomly in the middle is the one I’ve sent hundreds of messages to over the years.

Google+ the social network was surprisingly nice to use especially towards the end.

> profiles were automatically created if you had another google profile, pissing everyone off.

Yep, that was part of the commitment. They were fully committed and did it even how many people the annoyed along the way.

> they provided essentially no feature advantage over other social networks,

Towards the end it had a lot of advantages like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users as well as at least one advantage towards each other network.

Of course by then they'd made everyone angry and made everyone here shun them

> which means they had no weapon to fight against network effect.

Probably more what I wrote above IMO. Mixing the brilliant Google+ social network with the despised Google+ identity solution wasn't the most brilliant thing they did. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but still.

> they enforced a real name policy even as facebook became notorious for doing the same.

Yep. And when they finally created the best solution the web have seen so far it was too late.

> they aggressively banned business accounts, with obvious results.

Can't remember it but wouldn't surprise me at all.

They required real names at first (slavishly copying FB in that regard), and then later as they were obviously failing they tried offering the option to use a pseudonym. I tried it, and they rejected my handle for no reason given. This was the day I started to really have deep-rooted negative feelings for Google, it was just insulting to have my time wasted by an also-ran social network.

That was the last straw for me and I burned my G+ account to the ground.

I think Google suffers from something akin to the oil curse. They're throwing out dilettante efforts to diversify but never accomplishing anything noteworthy outside their core business. In that regard they're making the world worse, because they're soaking up top-tier talent and then producing garbage with it.

How is that compatible with their enforced (and disastrous) real name policy?

I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.

Exactly.

FWIW: That's what I tried to explain above: "like one login account but still true pseudonymity wrt to other users"

> I don’t recall the specifics but I remember the whole thing being very confusing as a user. It was definitely when I started losing trust in Google because there was never a clear benefit to me as a user.

On Google+ the social network it became really simple: You logged in using your main account.

Then in the upper right corner of the desktop (and probably in the hamburger menu on mobile) you could choose which connected identity you would like to post as.

Meaning one identity to answer serious questions about programming on the backend and another identity in a support group for front end developers etc ;-)

Google of course knew but back then we trusted Google.

I never used Google+ because it never made sense to me. There were probably a lot of great ideas that were just not obvious.

In hindsight it really looks like Yahoo all over again.

All the dirty laundry is coming out in the antitrust suits.

>Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents.

>Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg...: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal.

It's one of many things FB and G did together. Even more are listed in the antitrust lawsuit against Google.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...