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Inside the Failure of Google+

Posted by Soulskill on from the a-day-late-and-a-billion-users-short dept.

An anonymous reader writes: An article at Mashable walks through the rise and fall of Google+, from the company's worries of being displaced by Facebook to their eventual realization that Google services don't need social hooks. There are quotes from a number of employees and insiders, who mostly agree that the company didn't have the agility to build something so different from their previous services. "Most Google projects started small and grew organically in scale and importance. Buzz, the immediate predecessor to Plus, had barely a dozen people on staff. Plus, by comparison, had upwards of 1,000, sucked up from divisions across the company." Despite early data indicating users just weren't interested in Google+, management pushed for success as the only option. One employee said, "The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the thing taking off." Despite a strong feature set, there was no acknowledgment that to beat Facebook, you had to overcome the fact that everybody was already on Facebook.

3 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. Heavy hand vs Light touch by bangular · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Circles was a great idea. Google should have made plus a very lightweight site with circles and a couple of other features and an amazing API. Let the developers do the work for you. At that point, everything is sorta opt-in. No privacy issues. If I don't want my plus profile to have pictures, I just never download a picture app.

    Google's name is too tarnished with regards to privacy and will never be able to launch a social media site again. It's like McDonald's trying to launch a health food line. About all they can do at this point is a spin-off type company that is far far away from the Google name.

  2. Google+'s worst consequence by hudsucker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Now that Google+ is being deprecated, can we please have the + search operator back, to indicate a +required_term in the search results?

  3. Real name policy by jafffacake · · Score: 5, Interesting

    William Shatner killed google+ for me, when he signed up to it, google shut down his email account without any checks, leaving him with no recourse, and no email. Who wants to risk that? http://www.businessinsider.com...