5 Reasons Why Google Plus Failed

People like lists right? It seems to somehow make for good content, so I figured while I’m still going over the Google Plus shutdown that I would outlined what I consider the 5 major reasons why it failed in the end.

5. The tech media didn’t understand it

If you look back at the vast majority of tech news articles about Google Plus from more or less its first year of existence you’ll find a recurring pattern with buzz words like “ghost town” that were popular to throw about to qualify the product. The worst offenders were blogs like The Verge, Tech Crunch and Mashable, among others and yet for every unjustifyably scathing article they would publish you would find an author with a Google Plus account showing no activity or very little of it. For the vast majority it was tech journalists who were bitter that no one would follow them on the platform. And yet they somehow succeeded in spreading the ghost town myth, which probably deterred quite a few people from signing in and engaging.

4. It was ahead of its time

I may be making a bit of a bold statement here but the truth is Google Plus had amazing features that no other social network had. I recall being rather stunned when I discovered how Facebook effectively ripped the Lightbox window design which G+ had from day one. Its circles was also a way to organise the people you follow in an intelligent way which allowed you to share specific things to specific groups of people if you needed to. It came with a default set of circles when you created an account (if I recall those were, Friends, Family, Acquaintances and possibly Colleagues but I might be mis-remembering that last one), which you can then edit to match your own set of contacts and how they fit in your life. Often usage numbers were based on public posts but who knows how many private posts were made that no one else knew about.

Let’s not forget Ripples, which allowed you to see how your posts got reshared and how deep a reshare could grow (if you were the type of user who got reshared a lot… I wasn’t but that’s beside the point). Then Hangouts allowed you to converse with up to 15 people at the same time, at a point in time when its biggest competitor Skype really only allowed one to one conversations and ended up being bought by Microsoft. Photos never was as well organised as it could have been but at one point you had a lot of tools to retouch your images, add text and do all sorts of fun things, including the (in)famous “auto-awesome” feature. I still have saved winter photos with animated snow in the foreground, not very useful but fun. Nothing like that on Twitter that’s for sure.

And then the biggest (and last) innovation were collections. A way to organise posts under one label which people could choose to follow or unfollow. It turned what was just another social network into an interest-based network. For someone like me with so many different things I like to share it was a way to build multiple audiences which worked a treat. But users didn’t really understand collections and either didn’t use it or complained about it being another thing shoved in their face.

3. Too few Google executives were behind the product

This is the main reason why the product was eventually sent off to the Google Product Cemetery. Google Plus was for all intents and purposes the brain child of Vic Gundotra who at the time of it being released was number 8 in the grand chain of command at Google. Those were the days before Alphabet and that whole restructuring of things to please market investors and what not. Once Vic left, there was no one else left to take over with an equal amount of enthusiasm which could take Google Plus to a new level, engage with new users, make it attractive, safe and reliable. Instead its development team shrunk to ridiculous levels where they only had resources to patch bugs and none to develop new features.

No one cared anymore. Sundar Pitchai, the current CEO at Google had over twice as many followers on Google Plus as he has on Twitter yet he never used the former, preferring the latter for all his announcements. At Google I/O in 2017 when developers went to find photographers to test some feature or other, possibly to do with Google Photos they went on Instagram to find some, despite the fact that Google Plus had the best photographer community on the whole of social-mediadom at one point. Where once you would find loads of Googlers making compelling and interesting posts (anyone remembers Yonatan Zunger?), in the end there was nothing. And if Google employees can’t be excited about their own product, then who will? You can’t tell whether any of them uses Gmail or Google Maps or anything from GSuite but Google Plus was easier to scrutinise and that scrutiny was pretty disappointing.

For a rather insightful look at what it was like working as a developer there in the early days at the product I recommend Morgan Knutson’s rant on Twitter. It doesn’t tell the whole story about what happened in later years but it’s still rather shocking reading.

2. It was too integrated with other Google products

The clue is in the name (which I’ll get back to in a minute). Google Plus was to be the glue binding all the Google products together. Except nobody wanted that, and certainly not the users.

Sure it was useful to have your circles integrated into contacts or see if an email you received was from someone who had a Google Plus account but the big mistake was trying to force it on YouTubers, and you do not want to mess with YouTubers. Forcing them to have a Google Plus account did not help to bring them over to the platform. Rather it created a large group of users who quickly became scathing and embittered about a platform many of them weren’t interested in using, seeing as they already were on YouTube and that was enough for them.

But beyond all of that, its deep integration was what prompted a complete redesign in 2015 / 2016 with “new” and “classic” Google Plus living side by side for several months before “classic” got shelved altogether, leaving us with a complete redesign lacking half the features we had come to love. and as previously mentioned their development team was too stretch to not only redevelop but continually maintain aspects of the product they just did not have the manpower and funding for. Events is a perfect example of a feature users begged to see return but then never truly got properly integrated into the new interface as all the team could do was patch together old code to make it work as best they could. As a result you ended up with folks just not using it or being bombarded with random event invitations by people you didn’t know.

1. It had the wrong product name

I’m sure fellow G+ users are thinking: “surely you mean the number 1 reason was spam right?”. Well yes spam was a big problem but only if you ended up in the discovery stream, so you could argue that the discovery stream was the bigger problem.

However I maintain that Google Plus should never have been called “plus”, but given a unique and distinctive name. Of course Google is terrible at naming its products so that never came as a surprise but it wouldn’t have been unprecedented for them to rename a product once the “plus” part became obsolete. After all, Google Apps was renamed GSuite not too long ago. I tell you what I would have named it just to shut everyone up: GHost 😀

But on a more serious note, no one knew exactly what “plus” was for. Was it supposed to be some sort of advance search? Some math thing? In a world where many users still see their Internet Explorer (or Edge if you’re on Windows 10) icon on their Windows desktop as “the internet” you can be damn sure they won’t know what “Google Plus” is supposed to be for. And if you can’t have a relevant name for your users, they won’t come to you. Sure “Facebook” doesn’t really mean anything either but in its early days of let’s bring old school friends back together, the image of a school photo book full of mug shots (if you’re American; we never got those) somewhat matched the name.

“Google Plus” focuses on Google, not its users, and that, in the end, was Google’s biggest mistake.