I found G+ quite compelling. It was pleasant to use and I'm sure could of grown into a platform of its own. A place for features that made sense in their time and place and some kind of integration in some products. It seems YouTube is gaining some social features, for instance posts to followers and live chat. I think these would of been interesting areas to utilize g+. But then again I'm outside looking in, I can't speak to the costs they might of incurred letting things unfold at a more measured pace.

It wasn’t meaningfully better than FB (at the time) and there was no reason to switch.

100% was. I mean look at the modern usage of Instagram.

You have your Instagram, then your close friends list on Instagram. Then your finsta. And the close friends list on your finsta.

All of these are just g+ circles.

Facebook had lists (don't quote me on the name) which was very similar to Circles, without needing to be on the sahara desert of content which was Google+.

The advantage of FB was also that you saw content, whereas on Google+ everyone would have it locked up and you couldn't see it, great for the less popular types.

This comment reminds me of Google wave too.

Parts of it made sense, maybe a bit too early, not enough people using it.

I thought extra Instagram accounts are used as pseudonyms, which G+ was never willing to accommodate.

Instagram only implemented "close friends" after years of a solid user base to research the usefulness of that feature. It's not that they couldn't think of it; ideas are cheap. A lot of it has to do with the stories feature, an innovation stolen from Snapchat that G+ predates. And G+ Circles was way more complicated.

Circles feature was also marketed the wrong way. The G+ ad showed a lady bad-mouthing her boss in a circle that doesn't include him. Who's gonna put that much faith in the separation? The entire point of a finsta is that it's not a supported feature, so you can believe that it's totally separate and also has a different name. You'd use the finsta to bad-mouth your boss or perhaps even less wholesome things.

It was faster, had more features, and many of those were about your control. It was meaningfully better than FB in pretty much everything but active user numbers.

It was worse in the only way which mattered which was the content.

The biggest problem with G+ was they replaced GChat, and Hangouts was emphatically slower than GChat. Maybe the G+ product itself was fast - the only part of the product I actually used was a huge downgrade from what they had before. I actually stopped using GChat for years as a result, just because it was so slow.

Also I think Messenger may have been faster than Hangouts. It was not faster than GChat, but it didn't matter because Google killed it and that definitely drove me to use Messenger more.

Content aside, it was way more cumbersome to use than Facebook. My friends and I tried it cause one guy was a huge Google fanboy, and even he said "this sucks, man."

Scoble loved it /s

His former boss lit that dumpster fire. https://scobleizer.blog/2006/06/28/wow-vic-gundotra-leaves-m...

https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/vic-gundotra-the-father-of...

But the thing is, with a social networking site -- like a number of other products -- being objectively superior doesn't count for much if your friends are on the other one.

There is a way around this -- find an initial target audience (team gamers for Discord, students of particular colleges for Facebook), start out as a specialty site for those to get a nucleus of active users, and then start building out. But the kind of outreach and engagement (and, honestly marketing savvy) required to make this strategy actually work don't seem to be "Googley".

(It also helps to find target communities not well-served by incumbents -- like, perhaps, the multiple communities who interacted poorly with Facebook's "real names" policy. But instead, Google leadership insisted on copying that policy, and in a particularly heavy-handed way, to the point that Google employees couldn't register accounts with nicknames that they were actually known by to colleagues and family alike; see e.g. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/why-googles-rea... )

Well there I think part of the problem is that for the world's Googles running a boutique social networking site for auto mechanics or whatever makes less sense -- they'll want to have mass appeal from the jump.

It was! But forcing it on us made me hate not just Google+ but also YouTube and Chrome and Gmail. Suddenly I needed to worry that all of my Youtube comments would become published under my Real Name? And notifications for Google+ were showing up on my Chrome home screen? And it's pre-installed on my phone?

Google+ was pretty great. It had some really wonderful special interest communities, and it was really easy to separate my family identity from my tinkerer identity from my friends stuff. The whole circles and squares thing was a wonderful, front and center, privacy-focused metaphor, like some product people actually listened to what actual online community Ph.Ds were saying.

But the execs made everything worse repeatedly in an attempt to drive success metrics up.

Yeah. I liked most of G+, I like the current state of unified login, but oh boy. Those early unified login things were horrifyingly poorly done. Buggy, unfitting of how people used their systems, it was a disaster and I think it's a big part of why G+ failed.

This is the #1 biggest mistake large companies make when trying to force their way into a new product area.

"We already have a huge user base, we'll just automatically sign them up for <new thing> and get it off to a running start". No, these users will hate you for it and in fact ruin the experience for the select few who are actually interested. Meanwhile executives will tout the rosy user growth metrics, declare the launch a success and collect their bonuses.

There is no substitute for old-fashioned organic growth. Start small. Focus on early power users and listen to their feedback. Have something unique that sets you apart from the competition and attracts more users. This is how Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and the like were able to establish themselves in Facebook's presence while Google+ failed.

Not to mention that G+ had ideas that worked on paper about how users like to manage their connections, but didn't work in real life

Adding a new notification about everytime someone follows you is just asking for people to avoid the product

Is that different from Twitter, or appreciably different from Facebook?

Yes, their notifications were more "in your face" and for some reason you'd get a bunch of random people adding you to their "circle"

Poor UX management

It's surprising they didn't learn from Gmail. For a while I was the most popular person in my circle of business colleagues because I had gmail invites. Artificial scarcity goes a lot further than forcing something on everyone in the end.

On the contrary, they did try the artificial scarcity thing with G+, but unlike Gmail, a social network isn't really useful if your friends aren't on it.

They already knew that from Wave, which also had the "my friends aren't on it and I have no invites" headwind.

Yet Facebook was hyped because of artificial scarcity. They started by rolling out to one elite university at a time.

Gmail was able to leverage open email standards, so aren't constrained by network effect. Second, it was way ahead of competitors in terms of storage and overall product.

Google+ was competing head on with Facebook which had a huge leverage in terms of the network effect.

It doesn't work if the service needs the network effect. Google Wave crashed and burned right out of the gate because it was exclusive and it was exceedingly unlikely that all the people you wanted to collaborate with were able to get in.

Isn't Reddit what Google wave tried to be?

It worked well with Chrome though.

I remember the UI having made about as much sense as v1 of the Azure UI. I wouldn't have called it better than Facebook of the time in any way.

Well, it was more colorful I suppose.

It is funny because today I got an email that my work account was given a YouTube handle and it had my full name in the profile there. Same company practices 10 years on.

I still have two fuckin' YouTube accounts for some reason, too. Some devices log me into one, and some log me into the other one. It's almost as bad as Microsoft accounts.

One of the main problems of Google+ was that it hadn't the cool people on it, it was always too dork-looking.

Yeah they should play it safe and steady just like youtube shorts rollout. No need to panic. Ecosystem advantage is still with Google.

No, G+ was like the turned an ACL system into a social network. I even heard of someone using G+ circles for access control internally! And the G+ rollout redid how end user login works.

It wasn't just the execution, the basic idea was bad. The few people this overly complicated thing would appeal to are probably not the kind to use social media either.