that would be so wildly popular we could see a Diaspora

Maybe it could have page customization features that let you upload html. Have it be a really custom space of your own.

Could even start to resemble some sort of city

You would need a ring of people to help navigate around it.

At that point so much of our lives would start to be recorded digitally the internet could act as a kind of shared memory for the whole community

A living journal of some sort?

pastebin

Xanga

That might threaten current business models. The angles would set that on fire.

Would they use tripods like in war of the worlds?

By far the biggest thing people remember about Google+ was the hamfisting of it (several people lost their Youtube accounts) and yet people also reported that it was otherwise a good experience (compared to the Facebook feed); one thing Google had to contend with was Facebook not offering access to the social graph so they had to build the network effects by a more difficult route

eg Facebook replacing people's email addresses, one wonders if it was partly a way to fight Google+ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

I lost my original YouTube account due to Google+ spawning a new one from my gmail address I’d used to sign up for YT in the early days.

It’s been years and I’m still mildly annoyed about losing it.

Google also spawned a second one for me from my original gmail address, but I still use my original pre-google+ youtube account. After signing in to that google account on any given device, I have the option to switch between the two youtube accounts associated with the email.

That must be nice. Was your YT account also from before the acquisition?

My original account still exists and my face is in the videos as well but but I have no way to log in and support couldn’t or wouldn’t help me.

The original YT account associated with the email was created in mid-2010, so not pre-acquisition.

It's good that you have access to both; out of curiosity, is there any differentiation in the way it list them in the menu where you pick which one to use, or is the order consistent? I can imagine being mildly annoyed if I had to guess every time I logged into a new device which one was the one I wanted, although obviously that's still better than just not having a choice.

The one created for google+ is usually listed first. After signing into my google account on a new device, the google+ one is also the one that I'm usually automatically signed into.

If Google had any direction and purpose, it could have kept not fucking up Circles until Facebook (almost inevitably it seems in retrospect) messed up.

If Google just added customer happiness to their usual stuff it would fix a lot of things.

Can I just say, the comments that have happened here before mine, have been stellar. Wow. And also, it's so weird to have some nostalgia for all of this now...