Google+

» see plus.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

google+ launched on 28 june 2011 with a closed-beta invitation system that briefly made it feel exclusive. by september 2011 it was open to everyone. the pitch was that google+ would beat facebook by giving users better privacy controls (the "circles" feature) and tighter integration with the rest of google.

that pitch did not work. most people had already settled on facebook. moving everyone to google+ would have required all your friends to also move, and they did not move. google made the mistake of forcing google+ integration into other google products (gmail, youtube, comments) which annoyed people who did not want google+ accounts. the forced integration generated a lot of bad will without driving real google+ engagement.

i tried google+ for a few weeks in late 2011 like every other tech-curious nerd. circles were a nice idea. the interface was clean. there were almost no people i wanted to talk to on it. by november i had stopped logging in. the product survived another seven years. very few of those years had real users.

~ the case file ~

~ circles ~

circles were google+'s big differentiator. instead of a single friend list (like facebook), you put each contact into a "circle" (family, work, friends, acquaintances). when you posted, you chose which circles could see the post. on paper this was better privacy than facebook, where the choice was usually all-or-nothing.

in practice, circles were complicated. most people did not want to think about which audience each post should target. they wanted to write something and have it go out. facebook's simpler "post to wall, friends see it" model required less thought. google+ asked users to do social labor that facebook did not ask for. the circles feature was technically smart and culturally rejected.

~ the forced integration ~

google's worst google+ decision was forcing the product into other google services. starting in 2013, you needed a google+ account to comment on youtube. gmail integrated google+ contact suggestions. android phones pushed google+ signup at setup. the goal was to get to 500 million accounts. the result was 500 million accounts that nobody used.

the youtube integration was particularly hated. youtube comments became attached to your real name (because google+ used real names) and the comment section linked back to your google+ profile. comment quality on youtube went down as people moderated themselves with their real identities visible. the change was reversed in 2015 after years of user complaints.

~ the end ~

on 8 october 2018 google announced google+ would be shut down for consumers. the announcement was tied to a disclosure that a bug in the google+ API had exposed user data for somewhere between two and 50 million accounts. the bug had been fixed in march 2018 but had not been publicly disclosed at the time. when the wall street journal got the story, google decided to use it as the trigger to retire google+ entirely.

the consumer shutdown originally was scheduled for august 2019. another bug pushed it earlier. the final shutdown date was 2 april 2019. user data was preserved for download. the enterprise version of google+ kept running for a few years more under the name "google currents." that was retired in 2023.

~ what it taught us ~

google+ is the canonical case of a tech giant being unable to ship a social network. facebook had network effects. google had distribution and money. distribution and money were not enough. the network effect of "your friends are already on facebook" was a stronger force than google's ability to push google+ into your face.

the secondary lesson is that forcing users into a product they do not want is more costly than letting it fail. google's heavy integration of google+ into other products generated lasting user resentment. it took years to repair the relationship with the youtube comment audience. the original strategic mistake was assuming you could engineer a social network the same way you engineer a search engine.

google+ shutdown also accelerated the broader collapse of trust in google products that started with google reader. by 2019 there was a strong cultural sense that google would kill anything that did not become a top-tier business unit. google has confirmed this many times since.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »