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.