Since there are probably people on this forum that are young enough to not actually remember Google+'s launch (or just not be paying attention), this was one of its headlining features (limiting post visibility to specific "circles" you chose). It was a great idea, and would have been super useful if it was ever used by anyone but Google fanboys.

Google decided that the way to launch a new social network was to piss off the nucleus of it, namely, the users of its existing social apps. By canceling Reader, and going on a long, obnoxious push to unify gmail and YouTube accounts, two things literally no one wanted.

If they'd been clever enough to make Google+ an extension of those things, it might have gone somewhere.

They additionally alienated many potential early adopters with the "real names" policy...

That "real names" policy is the reason I have always been careful to never open YouTube while logged into any Google account: the understanding I gathered from the noise back then was that, if you ever logged into YouTube or Google+, and then Google for some reason decided that your name was not your real name, you could permanently lose access to more important things like Google Talk or Gmail.

Ah that fiasco! I'd memory-holed it. That was the final mistake, killing Reader was the first. I haven't forgiven them for it and I never will.

The sad thing is that Reader was already a successful social network on top of a RSS reader. But not successful enough for Google I guess...

I'll never forgive Google for killing Reader. I truly believe the internet would be very different today if Reader had stuck around.

I joined Google+ when it first came out and the idea of circles was good.

The problem is Google+ is that it was trying to be a new Facebook without anybody on it.

Those types of social media sites are only as good as the number of your friends, peers, family that are using them

The sad thing is that Facebook had the exact same functionality with lists. You could scope posts and everything. Someone made a clone of the Google+ Circles UI using the Facebook SDK to sort your friends into lists that I used and I still use those lists to scope posts to family only etc.