Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+

http://mashable.com/2015/08/02/google-plus-history/

by amlgsmsn • 11 years ago

151 155 11 years ago

pothibo• 11 years ago

I think where Google could build momentum is to try to go for a private ecosystem where everything you store (photos, notes, etc.) would be private. The facebook opposite.

That would be a solid alternative to Apple's ecosystem and you would see the benefits of going from Facebook to Google.

Google has a much better chance of competing against Apple's photo/notes/cloud services than it would beating Facebook. Also I believe there is going to be a tendency in the next few years to move out of Facebook because of the social network effect people want to get out of.

Google would be the only solid candidate for anyone not wanting to jump into Apple's products.

pinaceae• 11 years ago

so the polar opposite of anything google has done so far? ads pay their bills and ads and privacy don't mix.

alloyed• 11 years ago

Most people consider their gmail, drive, etc. accounts as private because their immediate acquaintances don't have access to them. Maybe a better word would be not shared?

toyg3• 11 years ago

Circles was the privacy-enhanced facebook. Surprise surprise, after a month nobody cared; in fact, as people acted all precious with their status messages, the "ghost town" meme started.

Privacy is like "corporate responsibility" or "environmental sustainability": the public at large simply does. Not. Care. They just want shiny sh*t for free.

brohoolio2• 11 years ago

Google has an opportunity to trash Apples ecosystem because of how apple doesn't get software or cloud well. I'm setting my mom up with Google photos on her iPhone because she can't figure out Apple's workflow.

allendoerfer6• 11 years ago

Google tried something like that. The whole circle idea was about control for the user of who he shares stuff what content with.

Facebook cannot be killed with something so similar to Facebook like Google+, much like Google cannot be killed with something like Bing. They are at a local maximum amassing lock-in and buying up every improvement on the status quo.

What might ultimately kill them is either EU regulation, a big Chinese domestic market or some jump in technology or business model. The end result might again look very similar to what we have now. I think in the beginning it would start out as something like Whatsapp or Siri. It could be something that takes over or kills advertisement completely like Amazons various tries to create a platform for all online commerce.

prapam22• 11 years ago

Whatsapp was a good strategic investment. Most of my friends spend more time on Whatsapp then facebook.

toyg3• 11 years ago

I think where G+ really missed a trick was in not publishing a write-API. They were clearly trying to force people away from FB, but an open API would have allowed for a smoother migration over time. Without automation, most people simply couldn't be bothered to post the same thing twice. Third-party twitter clients, which were being shafted around the same time, would have jumped on it.

This mistake, coupled with a double-edged focus on privacy (as people shared with less friends, others wouldn't see much content) and their disastrous Real Name idiocy, was their undoing - G+ became a me-too.

nigelk• 11 years ago

My understanding is that they didn't do a write API due to fear of automated spam and poor S/N ratios.

allendoerfer6• 11 years ago

You do not want to be the service people just dump their stuff to. Google tried that with Buzz and in failed even more horribly than +.

What you could do is be the service people use to write to other services and then gradually lock them out. Unfortunately the fight you have to take on against the platform you are cannibalizing is really something a few fast moving guys, who fly under the radar and have nothing to show for anyway, can do for a few months, but nothing a Google scale corporation can do.

toyg3• 11 years ago

Realistically though, nobody can now beat facebook at network effects, not big nor small. And that was already the case when G+ was launched. The best you can do is to allow people to try out your system with little investment, and then slowly persuade them to prefer it to the old system.

Buzz failed for very different causes: it was a twitter clone that offered no additional functionality and even compromised your gmail privacy.

kordless• 11 years ago

Then don't be a storage service and just run the API for them to shovel data from point A to point B.

I'm speaking for others, but I'll still say that sometimes we don't want some of the data we post accessible to others. That seems an obvious statement, but I always use Twitter in a way that I find acceptable for sharing data with everyone. Facebook and Google+ are used in that way, but also ways where I selectively share things with people I trust to view the data I post. (To be clear, I don't use Facebook at all.) That's where things get complicated, because the service must enforce rules to keep these people from seeing those people's data. Those rules turn into 'features' and then you have a problem.

A social sharing API doesn't need a ton of features, especially when it's designed to forward the data around to the people that need to see the data. By not storing it, you make things simpler and more resilient to attack.

wahsd• 11 years ago

I get your point about "being the service people just dump their stuff to" but it is still a valid point. The problem with the network effect that Facebook has so thoroughly entrenched is that, in my opinion, you have to first replicate the network before luring users away with better features or, e.g., offering a more anonymous or secure or less invasive alternative to Facebook. It's somewhat similar to how a supply vessel docks to the ISS in orbit, you first have to match the speed in orbit before making an approach and then docking.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

One thing Google is in a strong position to do is to provide content filters: spam, abuse, clickbait, and the rest of it. They've the technical chops and semantic processing background. Combine that with some appropriate personalisation and metrics and they might have something.

hga6• 11 years ago

The Real Name idiocy certainly convinced a number of people like myself, and those who listen to me for advice, to avoid it like the plague if you had an important established Google account for things like GMail. That they'd tie them all together and zap all of them if you failed their Real Names test made it just too dangerous.

Also made it clear they were not doing this for us.

Ah, as a very experienced text searcher (got into it in the early '90s in the document imaging arena) disabling a leading "+" for search terms was grossly obnoxious.

EarthLaunch7• 11 years ago

Now I have to wrap "every" "search term" "in quotes", it's completely absurd. Even then it assumes you made typos.

djur• 11 years ago

I would have used a G+ without the 'real name' policy right from the start. By the time they relaxed the policy, it was too late.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

"my" G+ account is register to agu monkey (not a real name at all), it made the whole thing pretty sad.

Also made it clear they were not doing this for us. Most important point in G+ state IMO

Whatever Facebook was, it was something out of a guy's desire (lowly or great). Google+ felt like yet another business attempt at market share grabbing. The original circle idea was cute, but everything else was corporate strategy and forced unification.

bane• 11 years ago

Google lost the plot with G+. The reason that Google is where it is is because it made things people wanted to use, they naturally came to use these things.

Around this time Google just simply forgot this, killed reader, killed ig, killed labs, and then tried to herd people into using an inferior social network, then tried to shove all of google's other products into this terrible product nobody wanted to use.

This is different than what happened during the search engine wars, where google's product was simply better than all the others and that's why people used it.

davidgerard• 11 years ago

People really wanted Facebook the product without Facebook the company. G+ had a golden opportunity, and they blew it.

allendoerfer6• 11 years ago

I assure you, that nobody outside our bubble ever thought something like that.

klausa• 11 years ago

I sincerely doubt that for people that wanted Facebook without Facebook Inc., Facebook with Google Inc. would be a winning proposition.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

Possibly a small cohort. But yes, absolutely.

yborg• 11 years ago

I think this may have had a lot to do with the guy they picked to run it. Vic Gundotra brought his Microsoft mentality with him, and proceeded to use it on Google.

varelse• 11 years ago

As someone who worked at Google when Google+ was released, IMO the failure was all about Vic Gundotra.

1. He's the elitist who went against Google's culture and separated the Google+ team in its own sooper sekrit headquarters with its own cafeteria.

2. He's the backstabbing liar who first said the company-wide annual bonus was going to be based on the success of Google+ and then when it briefly looked like it would be a facebook killer, he went back on his word, thus alienating pretty much everyone.

3. He's the out of touch dumba$$ behind real names that sucked the appeal out of Google+ and left it a dumping ground for stuff that didn't fit anywhere else.

The day Google+ was released, I was besieged with invite requests from friends and acquaintances. And the Google+ UI IMO was nicer than Facebook's (and it still is IMO). However, as soon as Google+ made it their business to out gay people using pseudonyms to stay in the closet, those requests stopped.

I'm sure there are many more reasons for the failure, but this was what I saw from within Google at the time.

bambax4• 11 years ago

At some point you began to have to use Goofle+ to post comments or ratings to Maps' POIs. (So I stopped.)

If you have to force people to use your product, and they still won't, the product is dead. There is no product. That Google couldn't see that is a little disturbing.

And let's not forget the damage Google+ did to search. You used to be able to use the + sign to force a word to appear in results documents, but this was changed to clumsy double quotes (on both sides of the word) because of G+...

techbio• 11 years ago

So how do you like the new Apple Music?

Gibbon1• 11 years ago

I think the progression is.

Provider: Here use X. Customers: Nope don't wanna. Provider: Okay now you have X to use Y. (lol got you) Customers: Stops using Y.

powera2• 11 years ago

I regret that I have but one +1 for this comment. This is exactly what happened. The thinking was, "We're going to make a successful social network ... what can we do that looks like successful products?" So the target audience is just "everyone", since of course everyone wants to use a successful social network. And if the stats don't look like they're successful, make up new stats ("the fastest growing social network ever" bullshit). And when that fails, we force as many products as possible to integrate with it, which of course they have to do because we're making a "successful" network and who wouldn't want to integrate with "success"?

alkonaut• 11 years ago

With a search engine the cost of switching is pretty small. I don't care if anyone else switches search engine when I do. Learning a new one is easy. Adding features and continuously making a slightly better product will make it a winner in the long run.

With social networks you just can't do that. The cost of switching is enormous for the individual user, and no new users will join the smaller network. It's s natural monopoly.

The only chance you have is to offer something else, such as a professional network (LinkedIn) or a similar thing to completely set it apart from all existing networks.

When I created my G+ account I expected to find features for adding/importing/inviting my FB contacts. Nothing. Google must have been too scared of legal fallout to just mass import users' networks.

The way G+ worked at launch, FB could have a year of downtime without risk of losing many users to other networks.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

Switching costs for search are far higher on the backside: advertising networks. That more than Google's search tech is its real strength IMO.

nostrademons2• 11 years ago

Steve Jobs deserves a lot of the credit for this as well:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-steve-jobs-infl...

Also, not in the article but reported in the press at the same time, Jobs told Page that he should be less afraid of ruffling feathers and more willing to command the company to do what he wants. Unfortunately, what worked for Steve Jobs wouldn't necessarily work for Larry Page.

brohoolio2• 11 years ago

You could tell right away that Google didn't have a clear vision for how people would use the service. They could have differentiated from Facebook with an emphasis on privacy or decent features. Instead of a social experience where people could interact with each other, you got something that was you could post something on your profile and people could comment on it. There was nothing special about the experience.

I've seen this multiple times when interacting with Google employees, just a sense of removal from the real world that permeates some of their choices. Stuff like, "oh, I guess the page on accessibility should be accessible."

bsbechtel2• 11 years ago

When you build a work environment that encourages people to spend their entire waking lives at work, this may be one of the outcomes.

asdfologist• 11 years ago

How's Facebook's work environment any different?

olivetree365• 11 years ago

How many Google+ failures do you think it would take to match the gigantic write off that Microsoft made for acquiring Nokia? The answer is a lot.

pavlov• 11 years ago

Not really comparable. Microsoft bought a unit with tens of thousands of employees, factories around the world, a (modestly) profitable featurephone business...

All that had some value in 2013 (although perhaps not the amount Microsoft paid for it). Microsoft's own decisions post-acquisition expedited the loss of value and resulted in them writing off the entire purchase price.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

Something catastrophic would have to happen to advertising.

Something might....

nkoren• 11 years ago

Hindsight is 20-20, of course. But in this case, foresight was 20-20: G+ has failed in almost exactly the way that I (and everybody I was talking to at the time) expected it to. For me, the saddest thing about G+'s failure has been its plodding inevitability.

It would be really interesting to see a more in-depth analysis of how this happened. It didn't happen because the folks at Google are stupid: from top to bottom, they are wicked smart. So how did such a mass delusion take hold? I'd be genuinely interested in hearing from people who expected G+ to succeed, and why they had this expectation, and how its failure has changed their perceptions.

candu• 11 years ago

I've seen similar patterns elsewhere: company X brings on powerful, smart, and egotistical person Y, who browbeats others into believing their pet project Z has to be top priority; those who disagree with Y leave Y's team (or perhaps leave X altogether); groupthink takes hold, and this perception of priority becomes reality; groupthink mutates into sunk cost fallacy to convince everyone to keep going.

This process is often reinforced with incentive structures:

- raised salaries for everyone working on Z; - higher performance bonuses offered to top performers on Z; - greater social cachet for those working on Z (more mentions in Q&A sessions, presentations, etc.; more marketing punch; more opportunities for advancement; air of secrecy; etc.)

Once the incentive structures take hold, even smarter employees have rational reasons to perpetuate Z.

gamesbrainiac• 11 years ago

Understood, but its not that google went social that was a problem, it was that they had no vision about how to do it in the first place. They perfectly executed their vision to create a social network, but people already had that.

It has little to do with egos and everything to do with bad planning and a panicked knee-jerk response to the crisis at hand.

EarthLaunch7• 11 years ago

It's going to be top down, so the most fundamental answer comes from the person running the company. The programmers are wicked smart at programming, but they do what the managers say, the managers are great managers but do what the division lead says, etc. There were apparently failures at multiple levels.

dnr2• 11 years ago

I don't think there was as mass delusion at all. Most of the googlers I knew were really skeptical of the thing, even ones that had to integrate their products with it. I think only the people working directly on it, and of course the management chain, were really convinced. It was the most top-down thing that I'd seen at google to that point.

zargath• 11 years ago

I never understood why Google tried to create a "closed social network inside the web", when Google (almost) is the web.

The technology behind Google+ seems nice tho ( so was Wave ), very snappy but that is probably because of lack of users. I like some of the communities there, but it seems to die slowly.

At the same time, a lot of people never gave G+ a chance, because they felt Google already had too much power. It felt like giving Google the "missing link". At least, that is my experience.

nathcd• 11 years ago

I never understood why Google tried to create a "closed social network inside the web", when Google (almost) is the web.

Agreed. I really wish Google would make all G+ feeds into RSS feeds, and add the ability to subscribe to any RSS feeds in the G+ stream/circles. This would effectively make G+ into an RSS feed reader, with the ability to very simply publish one's own feed. I'm sure not many would switch to using G+ as a feed reader in the near-term after they shut down Google Reader, but it would be a small first step to begin tearing down the giant walls around social networks.

Perdition• 11 years ago

At the same time, a lot of people never gave G+ a chance, because they felt Google already had too much power. It felt like giving Google the "missing link". At least, that is my experience.

That is how I felt. Once Google started doing things like trying to force people to link their YouTube and Gmail accounts I got off the bandwagon (I now not only don't login to YouTube I block YouTube from setting cookies altogether).

aikah2• 11 years ago

I never gave G+ a chance in retaliation of the closing of greader. I'm a pissed off user, and since Google has 0 notion of user satisfaction, I'm glad G+ is a failure."Free services" providers should not underestimate the fact that pissing off users will have a negative effects on potential new "free services". Who trusts Google with any service lasting on the long run ? I certainly don't. Why should I invest in something that will be gone soon? because I know in my guts G+ WILL be retired.

hga6• 11 years ago

Unless Wikipedia is lying, Google+ launched almost 2 years before the announcement of Google Reader's imminent shutdown.

mark_l_watson• 11 years ago

Sure Google made some mistakes with Google+ but it is a success as far as I am concerned. I use Google+ about an hour a week, Twitter about 20 minutes a week, and Facebook about 15 minutes a week.

If Google+ has a few hundred million regular users, that sounds good. Why the need to comptere with Facebook on numbers?

AreaGuy• 11 years ago

By that logic, they never should have shut down Google Reader, though, right?

Reader was my top visited site daily by far. Nothing replaced it.

EarthLaunch7• 11 years ago

I still have a reflex to type 'rea' in the url bar when I'm looking for interesting content. And every time it makes me irked with Google+.

jsnell• 11 years ago

If it did have a few hundred million actual regular users, that'd be really quite successful. But it seems incredibly unlikely to be true, but must instead be some kind of bogus definition optimized for hitting your OKRs. For example counting as users things like people logging onto third party sites using a G+ account or Youtube comment activity being artificially funneled into G+.

quonn• 11 years ago

If Google+ has a few hundred million regular users

Yes, but that seems unlikely.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

It's simply not true from public posting activity.

paulsutter• 11 years ago

Google plus has one terrific feature: it's a safe choice for both websites and users as an oauth login. Most people have an account, but nobody uses it as a social network (unless you know a lot of Google employees).

prapam22• 11 years ago

G+ tried to be too much like facebook social netwrok. Instead it should be like topic related like reddit more dicussions rather then memes. I do liek the communities and collections feature. The Android app is also very well designed.

amelius2• 11 years ago

As Google stumbled and failed and stumbled again, Facebook grew larger and more influential.

This just tells me the market is not open, and allows for no competition.

dperfect• 11 years ago

Lots of people throw out technical or social reasons for G+ failing, but I'd point to the factor that tends to be one of the most important make-it-or-break-it variables for any new venture's success (according to Bill Gross[1] anyway): timing.

If G+ had been released pre-Facebook (or at least earlier in Facebook's history) I doubt any of those technical points would have been show stoppers. G+ has/had a lot of little advantages over competitors, but none large enough to bring about the mass migration that G+ so desperately needed. With good timing, none of the little annoyances or problems with G+ would have likely mattered. Good product; unfortunate timing - at least with respect to the fundamental product being offered.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reaso...

jdp23• 11 years ago

Actually I think G+'s timing was just fine. Sure, earlier would have been better, but in 2011 a lot of people were very ready for an alternative to Facebook.

Google did an excellent job of targeting influencers and creating a wonderful experience for a few million people in the first several weeks of the "closed" beta. While most of the advantages were indeed small, there was one very big carrot: the possibility of improving your SEO via G+. [Of course a lot of people don't care about this, but they influencers they were talking about disproportionately do.] Facebook got caught somewhat flat-footed; Zuck threw everybody into lockdown mode for a few months, and when they surfaced, the general reaction "this is the best you can do?"

So while I agree that the technical issues weren't a major reason (Hangouts might have been janky but Facebook didn't have anything remotely comparable), I really do think it was the social stuff that killed them.

- the nymwars turned off a lot of their most enthusiastic early supporters, and turned the overall energy negative at a crucial time

- the failure to create a developer ecosystem (due to the lack of a write API) left them unable to leverage their deep pockets for a longer-term war of attrition against Facebook

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

Google were tremendously effective at killing off early enthusiasm.

Nymwars. Relevance. Hinky UI (and still). Lack of search. Poor formatting options (and still almost wholly neglected.) Forced integration. Too many SEO types.

Much of it screams "this sovles Google's problems, not yours."

resu_nimda• 11 years ago

The entire purpose of G+ was as a reaction to Facebook and it was largely a clone of Facebook. It's not like they were developing their own product and just got screwed by timing, the entire concept and project was only possible in a Facebook-dominated world. Sure, if someone who cloned Product X had been able to release before that product, it would be better for them, but they never had the original idea so it seems moot.

I think it basically was the social reasons. The name is really clunky and corporate. It was never that cool or exciting to people. The lack of original inspiration and the obvious ham-handed attempt to move people from Facebook just made it fall flat.

dimbirol4• 11 years ago

G+'s timing was very good. It was the time were people still wanted to use social media but grew tired of facebook. Now there's a social media fatigue, people can't be arsed to sign up for something new. They'll log in to facebook once every few weeks and for the daily conversation they'll use WhatsApp.

engi_nerd• 11 years ago

Not everyone is the same. I have never used WhatsApp. And most of my family is on Facebook, so I use it pretty much every day.

Bartweiss2• 11 years ago

People will put up with a lot of technical annoyances, but Google+ went far beyond annoyances.

I had a boss who's Google Plus page was owned by one of his other employees - they were on so many of the same emails that Google guessed who was who wrong. The two of them, working together, couldn't figure out how to hand the profile to its real owner. Similar experiences with identity issues and unusable bugs abounded.

It's one thing to have a hard-to-use website, or one that crashes sporadically. It's another to have errors so severe that they make the site permanently unusable for some people.

balladeer• 11 years ago

No, it's that inherent non-visual (and maybe visual too) unattractiveness that killed (or is killing) G+, not it being a post-Facebook SNS. Facebook, with all its questionable practises and unquestionably appalling privacy attitude, got one thing right - it gave what users wanted and needed in real at that time. It didn't, unlike G+, went on to tell people "hey, you want this!", "Hey, you want this profile to be everywhere, even in your YouTube comments", "No, you do not want your user-name as `balladeer` - which is btw still available, you want `balladeer132`". Just few examples and simple day-today usability fails at the lowest level.

none of the little annoyances or problems with G+ would have likely mattered

Yes, it would have mattered. It has happened before.

You know Orkut had every reason for not failing. I mean everybody was on Orkut seeing the Internet penetration at that time (at least in my part of the world) and Orkutting was the thing - for us there was no Twitter, no Instagram, no MySpace, traces of Friendster, but just Orkut. But it failed. It was pre-Facebook (by a a few weeks iirc) and had gained momentum long before Facebook did.

What else surprises me? The fact that what every one - I mean every Tom, Dick, Harry - knew was seemingly unknown to the G+/G leaders. Many of their decisions brought universal reactions of a metaphoric "really?" and they would do that all over again as there was a total communication gap with them and the rest of the world.

Good product; unfortunate timing

Imho it's actually like: good idea (but nothing innovative; in fact many times repeated) badly executed (and more bad repeatedly over the time) is failing as expected.

Wave, Buzz, Orkut, G+

For all that success, the Internet giant just couldn't seem to figure out social

I think this lines really sums it.

Maybe they banked upon the number they had in all their G-ecosystem and they believed they could just herd the flock.

chetanahuja• 11 years ago

"What else surprises me? The fact that what every one - I mean every Tom, Dick, Harry - knew was seemingly unknown to the G+/G leaders. Many of their decisions brought universal reactions of a metaphoric "really?" and they would do that all over again as there was a total communication gap with them and the rest of the world."

This more than anything. And it was not just the external observers either. As pointed out in the article, Vic ran roughshod over the entire company to push his agenda. As is well known, a very large fraction of the rank-and-file employees were up in arms over the real-name policy. There were petitions against it signed by thousands of employees. None of that was heeded by the leadership.

nostrademons2• 11 years ago

Orkut was released pre-Facebook. It was actually a lot more successful than most people give it credit for, but its primary success was in countries that most Americans are unaware of. Years of neglect meant that when Facebook finally expanded into those regions, it didn't really stand a chance.

bambax4• 11 years ago

G+ was a Facebook clone. You can't release the clone before the model it's based on, or else the universe folds onto itself, or something.

cddotdotslash• 11 years ago

The article touched on this briefly, but my personal opinion about why Google+ failed is because it isn't needed. People who have spent hundreds of hours cultivating their Facebook profiles, building out their networks, etc. had zero reason to switch. Any time I asked a friend to join Google+ the answer was always "Why? Facebook works fine." While people in the tech echo chamber are always searching for new products and new ways to use online services, the vast majority of people simply don't care. Honestly, G+ could have been the best platform in the world and I doubt people would have switched only because what they had already worked.

Negative1• 11 years ago

Indeed, it broke Google's #1 rule for new products; make something 10x (i.e. substantially) better.

Google+ was great. It just didn't do a much better job of solving a problem that Facebook already had.

One strategy would have been to integrate Google+ into Google Contacts, Photos, Messaging, basically forcing people to integrate their social network into their phone and gmail contacts, messaging etc... People would have been pissed, but it would have actually provided a unique utility (one place for all your social interactions).

A bold move is what it takes to dethrone a king.

aleh2• 11 years ago

I would give up Gmail, really.

amelius2• 11 years ago

"Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive.

He could also have said: "Apple is going to block ads in their new version of Safari. Soon they will introduce iPhone native search, and nobody will ever see Google again."

dgudkov2• 11 years ago

Google+ missed the chance to become an introvert-style social network. Facebook with its 'Like' buttons and tendency to self-exposure is clearly targeted at extroverts. Google+ could've made its bet on introverts.

pohl2• 11 years ago

I'm surprised to hear "likes" associated with extroversion.

I tend towards a mere like when I'm feeling more introverted. To me, commenting and sharing are the extroverted alternatives — and liking is the absolute least one can do that still technically qualifies as "social".

Lowering the friction to increase social participation is precisely catering towards introverts, from my perspective, and that is what Like and +1 do.

dgudkov2• 11 years ago

Since "like" counters are public they are often become a form of competition or a way to boost self-esteem which is a very extrovert style of socialization. Though I'm not sure what introvert-style socializing should be. I guess it should include mostly small groups (circles?) because introverts usually don't large social groups. Also a different approach to "friending".

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

I've long preferred that my own actions _aren't_ visible to others. HN or Reddit style. On Reddit, votes in aggregate are visible, on HN not even that, other than to the author.

But no "pohl up-triangled your HN comment".

Pamar• 11 years ago

I think you nailed it, at least for me. I am a regular Google+ user, and I never created a Facebook account. When I wanted to share stuff with people I posted it on my website or sent out emails to hand-selected groups with shared interests.

G+ circles were a blessing for me.

I hope I won't have to leave Google+

orf• 11 years ago

Facebook's killer feature, the one everyone uses, is messenger. The timeline is dead, none of my friends really post much anymore, the primary reason people I know still use it is because of the ubiquitous messenger presence. If google went after that with a messenger focused network I think they would have had a great chance at taking over Facebook.

vermooten• 11 years ago

I don't use messenger on FB. I just use FB to post pictures of cats and to see what my 'friends' have been up to. I like FB's light touch, you can just hit 'Like' to remind people you exist.

EarthLaunch7• 11 years ago

If Facebook's really just a messenger then it's in trouble. You use a messenger to chat with people you actively want to talk with, and that type of messenger service booms then disappears after a few years as most people move on. (AOL, ICQ, MSN, AIM, Skype, etc)

kolev• 11 years ago

Google+ did not make big mistakes. For example, their mobile experience is much better. People just didn't want to leave the social network most of their friends are on already. Same with Ello. People are lazy. But Google+ pressed Facebook to innovate. We won, Google lost.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

No, it committed numerous cardinal errors.

#nymwars, noisy content (with poor controls), confusing UI, and intent that was expressly counter to users' interests really didn't help.

See Tim O'Reilly's Aug 23, 2011 post requesting topics for conversation with Bradley Horowitz:

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/A1qHbykj...

As I commented recently on a private re-share:

What's telling to me are:

1. How many times Real Names / Nymwars came up.

2. The alienation issue: how Google were (and frankly, have) demolished goodwill with their core tech evangelist community (I used to be one, I no longer am).

3. How lacking Google's first instance of G+ was: no search. For reals.

4. Requests that remain unanswered. Especially subscribable circles / feeds, RSS, and tags.

5. How many names I recognize here. Many are in my Circles. A few are long gone.

michaelochurch2• 11 years ago

Facebook succeeded in a crowded space, full of mediocre but wealthy competition, because of where it started. It began at Harvard, moved out to the Ivies, then the top 100 universities, then all universities, then everyone. By this point, it had iterated its way out of the technical failings of the initial product (except for the use of PHP, which still hasn't been entirely undone).

Google+, when it started, was superior in almost every way to Facebook in its first few years. (That's not a fair comparison. Facebook was a startup social network; Google+ came out of the gate at 120 mph.) It had Hangouts, which would have been a killer app if people had actually used them as a sharable social space (i.e. to "hang out") as the execs thought they would. The problem was that Google thought its muscle would allow it to take a greatest-fixed-point approach (i.e. a "stay popular once popular" strategy) whereas any social network needs to focus on the least fixed point, because that's where it's going to land. It had wealth but no users and no credibility, and it wasn't able to get those.

Hangouts are genuinely useful and there was some guy at Google who argued that courting independent game developers (and getting high quality products, rather than third-string products and Zyngarbage from mainstream publishers who expected Google+ to fail and weren't going to use their best stuff) would have allowed Google+ to grow organically and inductively, with the same "cognitively upscale" initial user base that made Facebook, thus proving Hangouts and moving to progressively larger subsets of the population. It became obvious that the failure of Google Games (and, possibly, of Google+ in its entirety) came from Google's leadership not listening to him. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.

powera2• 11 years ago

The one person at Google more wrong than Vic Gundotra still thinks that G+ failed because people didn't listen to HIM enough. How shocking. (and seriously, do you really think one person could have fixed the turd of G+ even with a billion dollar idea?)

michaelochurch2• 11 years ago

Google+ needed to establish a core group of users who (a) weren't associated with Google, and (b) liked their offering better than Facebook, and (c) were in a space that Facebook would have trouble taking over. Games was prime territory, because Facebook fucked it up by letting Zynga be its tapeworm for so long. If we could show caution and attention to quality in this space, people would have been more likely to trust us in a time when they were (much moreso than now) upset with Facebook.

U.S. Facebook engagement was actually dropping in 2011 and the Zynga games were the reason why. People hated those games.

Google+ could have gotten some more air time with that idea. What they did with it, I can't predict. Sometimes, more air time means not crashing; sometimes, it just means crashing later. It would have had a chance with Real Games, though, and I'll take "a chance" over "no chance" any day of the week.

Anyway, I'm glad that Google lost. A closed-allocation company with stack ranking deserves to get beaten. So there.

sheepmullet• 11 years ago

Listening to him couldn't have made G+ any more of a failure.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

Why nobody gets the Harvard connection and phased growth through Ivies and selective universities I just don't get.

Games I'm not so sure. Addictive yes. But so's crack, and that doesn't make for a good neighborhood.

I cheared, loudly, when Games died.

sakopov• 11 years ago

I honestly think that some areas of social networking phenomena are dying and Google+ came on board at the beginning of the end. From my observation, Facebook is dying a slow death. I see most of my Facebook "friends" aren't posting anything anymore and just browse. Some only post check-ins when they travel, otherwise everything is deadly silent. I have my Facebook disabled most of the time, but every once in a while i login to see what's going on with some folks across the pond and all I see is everyone reposting news. Facebook has become a boring place to read quirky news and get on with the rest of your day. And when discussing this with some friends who were at some point active on Facebook I consistently get the same "there is nothing going on it" response. I can't imagine that this will continue for much longer.

Frankly, another big reason G+ failed is because most people using Facebook didn't need anything else. Google essentially tried to fix a problem that wasn't even a problem. Yes, Facebookers complained about privacy concerns, but those who did were likely not even 2% of the entire user base.

akshatpradhan• 11 years ago

Facebook did great at bringing people together online, but once we were online together, we had no clue what to do. Meetup is the opposite, encouraging you to meet offline and I think that's the future of social networking.

debaserab2• 11 years ago

Facebook actually solves that quite well - that is my primary use of Facebook: to schedule and Rsvp events with friends. One of the key reasons it works so well for that is that it's ubiquitous (something that meetup is not)

Yhippa• 11 years ago

I'm seeing more subreddits having local meetups. That's a cool idea because it's a free way of finding people who share your interests. I think you're right. IRL social networking is the way to go.

aleh2• 11 years ago

Totally agree on the "beginning of the end" of social networking. These days Facebook content quality is on par with TV and keeps going down.

Thaxll• 11 years ago

Facebook isn't dying at all, they're getting more and more people on their platform at a fast rate.

In fact half the population connected to internet is using Facebook.

GBond• 11 years ago

From my observation, Facebook is dying a slow death.

The problem with this statement is that the data (users, engagement %, profit) tells a different story.

EarthLaunch7• 11 years ago

I've never seen this mentioned so I'm doing to mention it. I suspect Google+, and the cannibalizing of other projects, was directed by Page. He became CEO in April 2011. G+ launched in late June 2011. April-May-June is about 90 days. From the article:

The massive Google+ launch effort had all the hallmarks of a technology corporation: a code name ("Emerald Sea"), an artificial timeline (100 days to launch!), a dedicated secret building (with the CEO relocated there) and a full PR blitz once completed.

The CEO puts his office in the G+ building. I see that as Page being the driving force behind this. The article says:

"Vic was just this constant bug in Larry's ear: 'Facebook is going to kill us. Facebook is going to kill us,'" says a former Google executive. "I am pretty sure Vic managed to frighten Larry into action. And voila: Google+ was born."

But for what actually happened to have happened, Page had to have bought into the idea independently (assuming he is independent). Every article I've seen about G+'s failure fails to mention anything about Page's role - this article goes out of its way in this strange way to try to say Page was just 'whispered to too much'.

By early 2014, less than three years after its big launch, the Google+ team had moved out of its coveted building to a spot on campus further from Page. Gundotra announced his departure from the company that April — in a Google+ post, of course — to pursue "a new journey."

The G+ push/force was still in full-swing on the consumer side through 2014. Evidence that Page was the driving force, not Vic.

This was an organization-centric article, but I wish it had mentioned the other potential causes for G+'s failure, such as being invite-only during the media attention, and the rude forcing of people over from other platforms (Reader, YouTube, Maps, business listings, etc).

this_user• 11 years ago

Also worth mentioning is that Eric Schmidt resigned as CEO to make room for Page. I have my suspicions that he and Larry disagreed on the G+ strategy which led to the latter taking the helm (or the former offering his resignation first) in order to do what he thought was necessary.

mycelium2• 11 years ago

The CEO puts his office in the G+ building. I see that as Page being the driving force behind this.

No, that reads as Vic Gundotra being the driving force behind this and Page buying in fully. If Page was the driving force, Gundotra would have put his office by Page's.

Page had to have bought into the idea independently (assuming he is independent).

I don't think Page was independent. He was a brand new (in some sense) CEO with a lot to prove to shareholders and he had to make a big splash. Although his leadership has improved and he clearly came back to power with a vision to unify Google's services, he still had a vibe of being a bit unsure.

My perception of the management at Google is that they mostly come from the engineering side and don't typically do things like overhype themselves or their projects—they generally call the importance of their projects as they see them.

So along came Gundotra, who had spent 15 years at Microsoft in the most political meat grinder on the planet and was wayy more politically savvy then the rest of the management—and sells Facebook as an existential threat and G+ as salvation with unflinching confidence, plus a little bit of brown-nosing that would go a long way with an insecure new CEO. Feeling this versus the even-keeled/mildly pessimistic reporting styles that the rest of his engineering management had, I think Page bought into it hard, and G+ was history.

Although it's circumstantial evidence, the conditions inside the G+ team were insanely political versus other Google orgs. I think this is a mirror of Gundotra's style.

The G+ push/force was still in full-swing on the consumer side through 2014.

Really? Everyone knew it was dead. I perceived that as merely consolidating the unified logon/identity system they'd build in G+.

chengiz• 11 years ago

I agree. These articles seem way to eager to name a scapegoat. The "whispering in his ear" thing has been around for a while historically speaking, and apparently it's still not gotten old.

javiercr• 11 years ago

The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the thing taking off

This is a constant in every struggling project / startup.

rogerbinns• 11 years ago

What killed G+ for me was how hard they made it to actually read anything. Originally it was okay, but as time progressed they favoured images over text, and then kept spreading text out further and further apart. I took a screenshot at one point where I highlighted in yellow the actual readable content, making up a tiny proportion of the page: http://i.imgur.com/d8qwVpc.png

Of course they had years of experience in helping people read content with Google Reader, so that had to be shut down and lessons ignored. Then they made sure there was no API, or even RSS feeds, so no one else could make a more efficient reader either.

Or in other words, did anyone at Google actually try using their product? (I seem to say that a lot about different Google products.)

Metapony2• 11 years ago

This is a great point, thanks for the screenshot, it's very illustrative.

alexschleber• 11 years ago

I've been saying the same thing for ages... there even was a hashtag around at the time in 2012 if I recall... #waronwords

Google could never decide if they wanted to G+ to basically be Instagram (not surprising given Horowitz' Yahoo/flickr background), or if there was something to be done along the Interest Graph angle a la Reader / HN / Reddit / asf. The info density for the latter has always been terrible on G+, not to speak of various other iniquities that text-heavy posts (or post shares) had to endure for years, like much smaller images in the stream for the longest time.

Really they should have just split these two use cases into either two separate apps (maybe to prescient for 2011), or at least provided alternative UI views. Of course, a solid API including Write could have solved it as well as you alluded to.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

I think there is a very simple reason why this did not take off: google is not in it for the long haul on social projects (see 'orkut') so why invest in their platform?

As long as a company pulls the plug on projects that involve user investment with some regularity there is little chance that they'll be able to launch a social platform requiring significant investment from the audience they seek. You can kill only so many projects before people will become wary of trying out your next project, no matter how hard you try to force it on them. In fact, forcing it on them reeks of desperation and that is another nail in the coffin.

Technology and the real-names fiasco were for sure factors but I just don't see google 'getting' social.

bitL• 11 years ago

I can't help myself, but since Google+ I feel like Google lost its way - forcing us by nagging to accept various unpleasant and not very well thought out ways to use their services while seeing their search quality deteriorating (feels to me like Altavista now, XX search result pages clicked through and still being unable to find relevant stuff way too often). I am really worried about their future now and hope they won't end up as SUN...

KineticTroi• 11 years ago

I believe Google+ failed simply because it was Google. Had it had any kind of a human, friendly, or small startup, perhaps people might have given it a try.

People don't want Google integrated with their YouTube account, coupled with their Facebook pages, coupled with their email, coupled with their contacts, and on-and on it goes with Google. No respect for separation of the information.

I darned sure didn't like it when Google took over my YouTube experience. Now I have pray that I don't accidentally access a sexy YouTube video with the computer logged into my wife's account. Now, all of my previous viewing will be highlighter all over her YouTube page the next time she logs in.

These guys are really stupid in trying to unify every internet experience we have all into one nosy mother-in-law. It's the essence of evil they promised not to become a part of.

Bartweiss2• 11 years ago

Google did manage to strike the worst possible balance of size and network effects. Facebook was good because everyone was on Facebook - Google+ was bad because everything else was on Google.

The positive network effect of social media is that it helps you find everyone you want to talk to. The negative effect is that it denies you the ability to compartmentalize your behavior - to talk about indie bands on Pitchfork, and then secretly enjoy Nirvana on Youtube.

Google+ didn't have any active users, so it lost the positive network effect, but it was incredibly aggressive about forcing you to use it in every place possible (and with more sharing than you wanted). The result was that they only got a loss of compartmentalization, without any actual social benefit.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

Thank you. That's an excellent expression of Google's negative value proposition IMO as a social network.

I actually somewhat like G+. But because Google has so much of the rest of my life, I'm:

1. Not willing to participate on G+ as "me" under a real name.

2. I'm going to withdraw as much other content from G+ as possible.

dimbirol4• 11 years ago

Have a look at Google+ and you'll understand why people say that they are an ad company and not a tech company anymore.

hussong• 11 years ago

I just looked at the page for the first time in ages and I'm surprised they don't even get the fundamentals right: tiny fonts, pinterest layout for text items, terrible line height and length. Hopelessly useless even for skimming news headlines.

pbreit• 11 years ago

I don't think that's quite right. The problem is that you can't just slap a social network together. You have to figure out why you're doing it, why you're the one to do it, what the user want/need, etc. I didn't see any of that with Plus.

lnanek2• 11 years ago

Google ripped out its elaborate internal video conferencing system and forced employees to use the Google+ Hangouts video chat feature in Plus, which one employee described as "janky."

This is still the worst fallout for me. Whenever I need to do a video call with someone it involves lots of hair pulling trying to get everyone to press weird "say hi" buttons on profiles before it will ever even manage to show messages between each other, let alone video conference. Half the time it doesn't and we all just use Skype which is reliable. Google Talk was actually good, Google Hangouts is just broken and killed it for an inferior product.

joesmo2• 11 years ago

Didn't Google learn from Buzz that the world didn't want another social network of the kind that already existed? I guess not.

Google's just amazing at building technology no one wants/needs. Wave, Buzz, G+, are all great examples of that. If only they could hire someone like me (and many others with common sense in this area, I'm far from special in this regard) who would have told them even before release the G+ would have been a failure. And Buzz and Wave and probably a whole bunch of other great technology that ended up being useless.

probably_wrong• 11 years ago

Didn't Google learn from Buzz that the world didn't want another social network of the kind that already existed? I guess not.

I disagree - I think a lot of people were expecting exactly that[1]. But I think the big mistakes were a_ forcing every Gmail/Toutube user to use it (and with real names, which was even worse), and b_ stop halfway and claim "it's not a social network, it's an identity service", essentially giving up.

Had Google stuck to the "Facebook for those that hate Facebook", I think it could have worked.

[1] http://xkcd.com/918

joesmo2• 11 years ago

That's possible, but it would have required proper execution from the Buzz, and later, the G+ team. From a security / privacy point of view Buzz was worse than Facebook almost instantly, though it clearly tried to emulate Twitter feature-wise. Considering that the security / privacy angle was the reason most people who didn't like Facebook didn't like Facebook, Buzz failed miserably, exposing conversations and connections that its users didn't want exposed. That was even more of a mistake than the real names issue as it instantly destroyed credibility in the network (at that time I don't even think Buzz had been completely rolled out). At that point, at least, a shrewd executive would have realized Google's inability to deliver a proper social network (as if the Youtube social experience didn't already indicate this) and not started G+. Either way you look at it, G+ was an avoidable failure with years of warnings that it would fail and at least one defining failed preceding network (two if you include Youtube).

Marazan• 11 years ago

When G+ launched people were primed to move away from Facebook. When people saw that G+ was both twitter and facebook in a single package they were wowed.

G+ was ready to succeed big.

RealNames killed G+, the most transparently Moronic decision of the last decade or so in tech

PuffinBlue• 11 years ago

It wasn't just real names though.

I agree the world was ready for a Facebook/Twitter hybrid network with the semi-anonymity of twitter but the interactive capabilities of Facebook.

In fact, I think it still is TBH.

But Google+ also integrated into your email and all other Google products. It was like Facebook but without the walled garden.

So yes, real names were a part of it but Google really wanted 'real everything', which was presumably to increase the users juicy ad relevance.

The 'real everything' thing had another effect - confusion. Google+ to comment on YouTube? I had friends literally not know Google owned YouTube, so when they needed this account to set up channels and comment they rightly noped out of there.

The name, Google Plus, didn't help. It was never its 'own' thing - it sort of 'was' Google, and Google is massive and has many services. If they have even limited it to a semi-walled garden network they might have had some success with real names, but so open, so interconnected and pervasive was just asking for failure.

They do have a chance still though. Get rid of real names, make it a separate network walled off from the rest of Google properties, still public like twitter but with the granularity of circles for semi-private stuff and it'll fly.

It's really a good service, much better than Twitter and despite the more 'anonymous' nature of the network it would still keep laying the golden advertising egg for them.

bambax4• 11 years ago

The name, Google Plus, didn't help.

Yes! What a stupid, simplistic and limited name. Most product names with Google are stupid ("Play"?!??) but Plus has to win the stupidity contest.

I remember when Vivendi's CEO invented "Vivendi Plus" (in 2000 or so) and even registered vivendiplus.com just to show how unprepared the company was (at the time of the announcement, it was a big surprise at headquarters...)

Brand extension never works, NEVER. There are many books written about this subject, one of the best being "Positionning" by Al Ries.

Google Video failed, Youtube thrived; there is no "Google mobile", but Android is doing pretty well, thank you very much. Gmail is not exactly "Google Mail".

Google Maps is a counter example, maybe because it feels like an extension of search.

dimbirol4• 11 years ago

The integration of all google products was a big problem as well.

I didn't want to be logged into google search when checking my email or having a youtube-account when signing up for g+.

Metapony2• 11 years ago

One aspect of Google+ that always grated on me was that the name was terrible branding. I don't know if I'm in the minority for feeling this way, but with with all their other services that one gets tied up with, you don't want a 'plus' you want to think about the social aspect as a compartmentalized, separate section. They'd have been much better off calling it something else, or at least trying to be a lot quieter about tying all of it together.

I am sure the social media trend numbers looked great on paper, but they severely underestimated how tired people would get with it. (I'd say only a small fraction of my facebook friends still are active there, for instance.)

Anyhow, my troubles with the G+ branding may sound like a nitpick, but I think it was a lot of the problem. People already had privacy concerns about Google, now they could have privacy concerns+.

dimbirol4• 11 years ago

There's no Google+ landing page.

If you want to participate and create a g+-account you'll automatically sign up for google search, gmail, google drive, youtube, google maps, play store, google maps with no option to opt out.

Now who thought this was a good idea?

But even if someone wanted all that, if you signed up for your business to have a youtube channel and a g+ page, you don't get your custom vanity URLs with the chosen account-name. That's remarkably bad UX.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

I pointed that out to Vic and Shindig YEARS ago. Drives me fucking nuts still.

These days I blackhole services that do this. Pinterest most recently.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

"Shimrit". Not "Shindig".

Fucking autocorrect.

nnq• 11 years ago

Puns aside... you can'd do social without having some kind of face.

Facebook really has face(s) (puns aside again): it has Mark Z's friendly looking face, it has the faces of all your friends and family that are already there, it has a warm-looking humane-looking brand (not with a damn mathematical sign like "+" in. its. freaking. name.), even the annoying-to-most-geeks UX has a "face" that you can recognize. Even when they do their ubercreepy stuff we all complain about, they do it with a face, you viscerally hate it or you get freaked out just like you would get freaked out by a stalker watching you naked... you don't just feel like your privacy is invaded by a mathematical equation. Facebook, the company, really feels like a "person" and not a "thing". (Yeah, to me at least it feels like an ubercreepy person for whom I want a restraining order and maybe a vicious guard dog too and few extra alarm systems to keep it as far away as possible... but it's still a "person"). And it's not a reaction, Facebook wan't born out of a reaction to MySpace, it "authentic" and people can feel this about a brand. That's why corporations can spend millions on buying a brand that "feels authentic" instead of "manufacturing a brand".

Facebook started with a bunch of cool faces and a cool story. They even made a movie out of that story! And a totally shitty technical platform, but that didn't matter. The gargantuan effort to make Google+ succeed looked like some folks' effort to make Esperanto into the de-facto international language instead of English. You needed the literary face of a Shakespeare, and the military face of a British Empire to make a language succeed, an beneath them an authentic foundation (English was not invented as a reaction to Latin!).

tdkl2• 11 years ago

G+ could be more popular if Google knew how to launch products - not tech demos. They launched the thing and made it invite only, when people were eager to try it out. I don't know who had this clever idea, maybe they thought they could repeat the Gmail launch or FB exclusivity.

dredmorbius15• 11 years ago

That's one constant criticism I disagree with strongly. Google released G+ too early and before it was ready. Some months to listen to criticism and address it would have helped massively. But Google were neither ready to iterate or listen.

mkawia• 11 years ago

As a social network it has failed , But as an Identify Platform it's really good . My g+ profile while doesn't have many posts like facebook/twitter or instagram but has the most data ,my search history,my app downloads,youtube browse history, knows my phone ,my number ,All the places I have lived ,places I have worked . If I log on a new device with my gmail/g+ all over sudden I have all this data working to make my surfing better.

Now if only they used that data to make a better Google plus feed ,It's the feed that died.

Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+

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