Inside the Failure of Google+

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.

Comments

Privacy

[xdor]

Biggest detraction was the unknown of how much of your browsing and searches and youtube video history would end up on your public profile. :)

Re:Privacy

[jellomizer]

As compared to Facebook?

Re: Privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact you're forced to tie everything to your Google+ profile with YouTube, Google play, and other services just sucked!

Re:Privacy

[SJHillman]

At least with Facebook, you generally knew what non-FB sites would post on your FB, as it would ask for your FB login. Google has the same thing, but the parts of the web that are already Google's don't have that separate login. The big ones would be your search history and YouTube.

Re:Privacy

[xdor]

Facebook doesn't have a search engine nor the defacto video sharing platform. But yes, Facebook is after the same things; Google had them already and was arbitrarily mesh-mashing them together -- very unsettling to the user.

Facebook is still a slow cooker, so the frogs don't notice.

Re:Privacy

[dpidcoe]

Except that facebook doesn't tie into the same account that I use for almost everything else.

Re:Privacy

[Austerity Empowers]

I've never seen anything on Facebook that I didn't post there, but I did see things on my Google+ page that I didn't put there. That prompted me to make everything I could find private, and that in turn killed Google+ for most people indefinitely. Worst perhaps is that Google+ is linked to what may actually be your real email account, whereas Facebook was linked to (in my case) my 90 year old two-spirit avatar from Stromness. Of course one can create a Google+ avatar, but because its so intertwined you really can't ever kill off one that is linked to your real account, you simply make it all boring.

Facebook has been slower: because only things you send it could be visible by undesireables, people have been slower and laxer in locking down their profiles. So you still see some fun things on FB that make it something to look at, schadenfreude at its finest. Ultimately FB primarily has turned into a conglomerate of a desperate small-business owners way to try to push their bad ideas on their friends, a place to post pictures of your children and a news aggregator. I don't think it has much of a future on its present vector either. It will simply last longer because it is slightly less dangerous.

Re:Privacy

[SydShamino]

I went in to Facebook knowing it was using my real name and all my posts were public. I self-censor as appropriate given that limitation.

Google started as a variety of unrelated anonymous and pseudonymous services that I already used when they decided to link them all together and tack on a real-name mandate. No thanks.

Re:Privacy

[TWX]

One also doesn't have to use facebook. I don't even have a facebook account, nor do I plan to ever have a facebook account.

On the other hand, for Google's integrated stuff for Android to work properly, ie, contacts list, mail, documents/drive, calendar, etc, one has to have a Google account. Before Plus, that Google account was essentially private. Plus felt like an unwelcome intrusion that was one messed up privacy setting away from publishing stuff that wasn't meant for more than my own personal interoperability.

Fact of the matter is, most people that want a social network for personal communication have signed up for one already, and they've probably gone with Facebook because it's the biggest, and being the biggest makes it easiest to justify choosing it. Google's attempts to foist Plus on us felt a lot like how Microsoft forced Internet Explorer on us by bundling it with Windows 95 OSR2 and later versions of Windows.

Re:Privacy

[Grishnakh]

Facebook is still a slow cooker, so the frogs don't notice.

This is wrong, and insulting to frogs. Contrary to popular opinion, a frog will not allow itself to be boiled alive, and when the water temperature gets too hot, will simply jump out of the pot. It's an old wives' tale that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled if you turn the temperature up slow enough.

It's only humans that are so stupid that they'll accept horrendous conditions if you make the change slow enough.

Re:Privacy

[MBGMorden]

Yes, definitely. Facebook IS a social media site. That's ALL it is. When I post things or pictures on there, it's stuff I'm explicitly putting out there for public consumption.

Google on the other hand, has a TON of services that contain private data. GMail, the search engine, and Drive. Heck even Picasa - it's a photo album program but many people were using it before it was "social". I'd upload pictures to link to in various forums and such. Took me by great surprise when I uploaded one right after Google+ went live and started getting comments on it. Granted, it was nothing embarrassing as I was linking it in a public discussion elsewhere, but what had been a gallery I had to provide a link to earlier was now just open for people in my "circles" to view. It's not the situation that's bad - it's that it STARTED as something else and then morphed into that.

Put simply - I don't have any issue with social media existing, but I don't want every single thing I use to be "socially connected".

Re:Privacy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

One also doesn't have to use facebook. I don't even have a facebook account,

Sure you do. Even if you don't register for the site, they create shadow accounts based on the contact numbers in people's phones, based on ID'ing the same person showing up in pictures, etc. They, I think, even allow your friends to tag you in pictures using the shadow account.

Google's attempts to foist Plus on us felt a lot like how Microsoft forced Internet Explorer on us by bundling it with Windows 95 OSR2 and later versions of Windows.

Nonsense. Microsoft was successful.

Re:Privacy

[Austerity Empowers]

Small business owners always will want a place, but they are relying on a captive audience to get visibility in a way they wouldn't otherwise get. Moths don't go to the zapper because they like electricity, they go because of the cool looking UV light. The current trend on FB is all electricity, no light. I predict this will stop being a thing, because we're going to stop visiting FB for social purposes if the present trend continues.

And you're exactly right, all the anti-obama nuttery, which is very popular amongst the senior crowd, is further drowning out the ability to share pictures of the brats with the people asking for pictures. Dear old mom watches Fox News for the day-time soap that it is, likes all the links and foists her various religious and political viewpoints on people for whatever reason she thinks we'd want to see it. In doing so that content gets served to her more, while my ability to send pictures of the kids, which she's asked for 15 times, gets diminished because she doesn't like or share that (not that I think she SHOULD). So in a nutshell my wife and I are using FB less and less, and back to email for sending pictures because email reliably gets through and is visible. Meanwhile I clearly don't share political or religious views with most FB people I am linked to (being a liberal in Texas), and actively want to avoid reading FB myself. I'm not alone, many of my friends have more or less abandoned their accounts because it's become a cacophony of various types of noise.

My point I guess is that FB is killing itself. It will live on, I'm sure, but its going over the peak and going to drop to some plateau. It's not going to be dominating the internet, and Google was foolish for being baited into believing it was ever a good idea. Social has never been an unmitigated good idea, it has some strengths but some weaknesses that most recently have culminated in inventing nuclear weapons to address.

Re:Privacy

[Jerry Atrick]

And that's their other mistake. The people that want a FB like service are already on Facebook. Google never stopped to consider why us holdouts aren't on FB, they just assumed we were waiting for something different/better and could be grabbed before FB wore us down.

Offering even more intrusive creepy tracking was never going to convert any of us.

Easy Stuff!

[s.petry]

Media of all kinds pushes, and has pushed Facebook. I have almost never heard any celebrity, actor, "news" caster, etc.. say "G+" in a positive context, only negative as in "nobody ever uses it" or "only tinfoil hatters and basement dwellers use it."

Media made Facebook by doing just the opposite. "follow us" is still heard more often than "visit us at our site".

Re:Easy Stuff!

[CannonballHead]

Isn't "Follow us" more a Twitter thing than a Facebook thing? "Like" us is Facebook-speak. I know, you can follow/add to feeds now, but that wasn't the origination of following... :)

Invested

[ZombieBraintrust]

Media doesn't want people switching because then they have to spend money on G+. They already spent marketing dollars on Facebook. Why would they want to waste that investment?

Re:"there was no acknowledgment that ..."

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse that they still don't realize their failure mode was also forcing users to use it. Google, in a general sense, doesn't do that, and their user base includes several people who simply don't react well to forced participation. Unsurprisingly, those users were upset and very vocal about it, harming acceptance. Hubris did them in.

exactly this.

[nimbius]

There was never any room for Plus. instead of recognizing a subset of users who enjoy social media and offering a better product, Plus focused on offering the same product. Then, when it didnt become an instant sensation, they threw a tantrum and made all users social media users by embedding Plus into everything that google did.

In addition to this, the UI was an erector set of cobbled together ideas from the thousands of people from different divisions that included aspects of facebook, myspace, and google search. intuitive features were buried in dropdowns and posts were, almost childishly, colour coded.

Re:exactly this.

[nine-times]

There was never any room for Plus. instead of recognizing a subset of users who enjoy social media and offering a better product, Plus focused on offering the same product. Then, when it didnt become an instant sensation, they threw a tantrum and made all users social media users by embedding Plus into everything that google did.

I actually think a big part of the failure of Google+ was something that, in hindsight, looks so small that a lot of people forget about it: When Google+ launched, it was a limited invite-only service.

Google had previously had good experiences with that sort of limited/phased rollout, particularly with Gmail. The fact that it was hard to get an invite helped generate hype for Gmail, and I suspect they were hoping that creating the same kind of artificial scarcity would help Google+ accounts to become equally sought-after. And it worked, for a little while. There was a brief period of time where lots of people wanted account, and they were nearly impossible to come by.

However, whereas Gmail users can continue to communicate with people who use other Email providers, the utility of having a Google+ account is directly related to having all of your friend on the same social network. Because of this, in hyping the service by limiting the availability of accounts, Google was shooting themselves in the foot. At the time of greatest hype, right when the early adopters and people who are social networking hubs would be most eager to try the service, they either weren't able to get an account, or else they got an account only to find that their friends couldn't get an account. In the very important window of time between when Google+ was launched and when people had made up their minds about it, it had already earned a reputation as being "possibly potentially good, but useless because no one is on it."

And that narrative just stuck. A social network with nobody on it is of no use to anyone, so the narrative became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Nobody ever bothered using Google+ because everyone already knew that nobody used it. As Google started to realize it was a failure, they then tried to force people to use it by linking it with all of their other services, but they should have known better. The harder they tried to push people to use it, the more of a backlash it created.

Remembering back to the time, there were a lot of people who had become frustrated with Facebook, and I think that it would have been possible to get a substantial user base simply by offering a viable alternative. Unfortunately, Google tried the wrong marketing strategy, generating hype by limiting availability, and it backfired spectacularly.

Key question now...

[frank_adrian314159]

A key question for communities that have migrated to G+ is where they're going to move to. If Google's other de-emphasized products are any indication, G+'s days may be numbered.

Technical superiority means very little

[PvtVoid]

The thing that distinguishes G+ is circles, which is actually a terrific idea. I have very little use for Facebook, but I use G+ for non-public communications quite regularly. (I won't call them exactly private, since the communications are still being mediated, and archived, by a centralized social network.) However, as with many other examples of technology, technical superiority doesn't mean much of anything with respect to widespread adoption. Facebook is the de facto standard, even if it sucks.

For me, and I would hazard to guess quite a few other people, the thing that makes G+ useful is that it failed to be adopted as a social media standard. I'll miss it when they finally turn it off.

Rise and Fall?

[JudgeFurious]

Google+ "rose" at some point? When did this happen? I must have missed it.

Heavy hand vs Light touch

[bangular]

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.

It was about identity, not social networking

[jfengel]

You don't need social networking for your apps, but you do need identity management. You have to log in.

That login is incredibly important. It's a pain in the ass for every site to implement their own identity management. It's really hard to do well, and developers would rather focus on the site/app's usage after the user has logged in.

So there's a weird overlap between Facebook and Google, even though they serve very different purposes. Both have become practically universal, and increasingly, sites are leveraging their identity management platforms. Facebook's ubiquity meant that Google risked losing their edge there. Can you imagine the point where Google says, "Screw it, we're just going to let people link their Google Docs to their Facebook account"?

Privacy advocates go nuts about that, of course, but a large swath of users are perfectly content to have the improved simplicity of just pressing a button to sign in to something once they've verified their identity to the device. It enables all kinds of evils, since your eggs are now all in one basket, and even a company without evil intentions is going to profit off being able to peek in the basket. The right tech can limit what information you're sharing, but Google and Facebook knew all.

Both Facebook accounts and Google accounts are ubiquitous, and if anybody could dislodge Facebook, it was Google. Facebook took it seriously, and they really upped their game to prevent G+ from taking over. The advantages G+ offered were slim. They tried to market it with better privacy, but few people want to work that hard. It attracted a bunch of privacy nerds, and nobody wants to be social with them but other techies.

Google wasn't ready to manage identity. They didn't offer any real advantages for it. People seem to be content to manage two identity management platforms when needed; we've been trained to think that having dozens of passwords is reasonable. I believe they could have succeeded if they'd gone to the next level, making Google Wallet really ubiquitous. Facebook's feature is rudimentary. Pay systems on the Internet still suck. But Google wasn't ready to pull that feat off, and people just didn't need a second social network when they had one they were happy with.

Here is the kille feature

[codeButcher]

I remember back in the day when I got a Facebook account, the colleague next to me asking: so what is this Facebook thing all about? Not very many people had heard about then. But for those family and friends that had, it was a great way to keep track of everyone (staying updated without, you know, actually engaging in social activities like phoning or e-mailing or meeting up). Which was great from the introvert standpoint. Back then, not much thought was spent on the more sinister intelligence-gathering capabilities. Ads were not really obnoxious.

Then it slowly, very slowly, turned up the frog heat. Today it is a place where the few social updates that you are still interested in, are buried between reams of mindless meme reposts, ads in which you have not the slightest interest, and algorithmic down-prioritisations.

Be the time G+ came along, I guess a lot of the more tech-savvy people had become clued-up and wary about the data-collection. I for one didn't want to give more data to yet another company, and strenuously declined to enter details, or use a G+ profile to log in to any of the few other google services I used. I also linked-out, have never twittered, instgrammed, whatsapped etc.

Giving people back a non-data-farmed, non-ad-soldout experience would have needed to be an indispensable part of their required killer feature set. But that of course didn't serve their purpose.

The name thing, too...

[seebs]

The name thing was a huge deal-breaker for a fair number of people, and the pathologically horrible way they handled it made it a lot worse. I know dozens of people who would have used G+ but walked away from it because at least one person they knew had bad experiences with it. I spent months with my G+ account in various kinds of limbo because the "appeals" process for name decisions was completely dysfunctional. I eventually ran into someone on slashdot who knew a person who knew a person who could unstick my account and get my name approved, but by that time everyone had lost interest.

And one of my friends used to have a Picassa account, and then somehow it got marked as a G+ profile thing (even though she never intentionally activated G+), and then suspended because their algorithm thought the name was unrealistic, and then she lost access to the Picassa stuff. I don't know whether that actually got resolved.

Very badly run at every level. The most frustrating thing is, they had a guy writing about this who was apparently in some kind of leadership role, and he talked about how the appeals process should work and how the name stuff should work... And nothing he said actually had any influence on the behavior of the product. The actual appeals process consisted of a thing that did not include any mechanism at all for stating your case or explaining why you felt a given name was the right name to use for you, which was then ignored by a machine or possibly a person, who knows. That's it. No mechanism for response or interaction.

Google's hatred of actually dealing with things personally interacted very badly with a policy which was inherently personal.

Google+'s worst consequence

[hudsucker]

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

Google didn't grab the opportunity

[Jim Hall]

I've said it before, but I'll repeat it here: Google didn't know how to capture public interest at the time.

I remember when Google+ first appeared as an "invite only" service. That was just before Facebook made the huge blunder of putting members' profile photos in ads for any pages they "Liked," suggesting an endorsement. A lot of people everywhere got really angry at Facebook about "faces on ads," and even threatened to leave Facebook because of it.

That would have been a great opportunity to open up the Google+ service to everyone, seize the opportunity when people wanted to abandon Facebook. But Google+ remained invite-only. Only a few people could get new accounts.

Over the next week, pretty much all you saw in the news was how people wanted to leave Facebook because of the "faces on ads" thing. What an abuse of privacy! You're stealing my image to sell products! There were a bunch of petitions for Facebook to undo the new "faces on ads," or else they would delete their Facebook accounts. The only problem was that there wasn't a viable alternate social network out there. Twitter wasn't really a replacement for how most people used Facebook.

And Google+ still remained invite-only. By then, a few people I knew had accounts, but had run out of invites to share. So few others could get in.

After a few weeks, Facebook decided to calm the storm, and undid "faces on ads." And as expected, people stopped freaking out about Facebook. After another week, even the tech websites stopped writing about "faces on ads."

And finally, Google+ went "live." Anyone could join. I had an account, but few of my other friends bothered to sign up. Why? Because they were still using Facebook, they got over the "faces on ads" fiasco. Without other people to share with, Google+ failed to gain critical mass.

Google+ failed because they didn't know how to respond to the opportunity that Facebook gave them.

Re:"there was no acknowledgment that ..."

[steelfood]

Initially, it was a success. People used it. There weren't a lot of people on it because of their invite-only policy, but its feature set sounded much more promising than Facebook.

The forced-integration with every other service, combined with the real name policy soured practically everybody. The nail in the coffin was when they started killing their services, irrespective of popularity *ahem* Reader *ahem*. A lot of people stopped using a good chunk of Google's services at that point.

Real name policy

[jafffacake]

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...