[toyg]

To be fair, G+-the-product is not bad. It's G+-the-borg, the forceful attitude towards integrating other Google properties and establishing a source of truth for real names, that generated backlash and eventually doomed the project.

[saalweachter]

The forceful integration was the product. G+ was adding a unified social network to all of Google; hence, Google+.

[toyg]

That might have been the internal aim of the project, but to the user G+ was just another social network. In that sense, it wasn't a terrible social network.

IMHO if Google had just kept G+ on its own (working hard on fixing the "ghost town" byproduct of evolved privacy features, and providing decent APIs), adoption numbers could have been lower in the short term, but the product would have survived in the long run. Integration with other Google products should have come naturally, not forcefully. Then we would have got a modern social network people actually wanted to join, instead of a tainted product stinking of corporate malfeasance.