[TomMasz]

I hear you but Facebook, for better or worse, is the social networking site everyone you know is on. It has a tremendous advantage over any upstart for that reason. Lots of geeky folks flocked to Google+ in its early days but that wasn't enough to replace Facebook. Even when they gave everyone who had a Google account of some kind a G+ profile it still wasn't enough. I will definitely check this out but it'll be back to FB when I need to know what my friends are up to.

[jay_kyburz]

Google+ always had a weird broken interface and they just never finished it. I was one of the geeks that flocked to it, and had plenty of friends there. It didn't fail because of network effects, it failed because they stopped working on it before it was finished.

It was really strange and I always assumed at the time that Facebook and Google had come to some agreement behind the scenes.

[post_below]

It really was strange, continues to be, the way Google wanders away from products before finishing them.

I get ditching things that don't work, but G+ is a great example of something that had plenty of traction in it's early days and, as far as I can see, lost it purely because G didn't seem to care about it.

[logjammin]

As a big fan of their Nexus line of mobile phones, I concur. They weren't perfect, but they were solid, stock Android devices at a reasonable cost.

Then they ditched them all of a sudden, and now we have premium-priced Pixels that fall well short of the competition.

[wutbrodo]

Can you elaborate on what you mean? From inside Google at the time, the general consensus was that they cared too much about it, at the cost of much of the rest of the company.

[post_below]

From the outside it appeared to be a bare framework that was never fully developed.

I didn't use it often but I checked on it periodically just to keep up on what was, hopefully, going to be a contender in the social media world. What I saw was almost no change in user facing functionality over the course of it's existence.

There also didn't seem to be any significant attempt at marketing, monetization or collaboration with the community.

Meanwhile there were significant influencers and content producers with large numbers of followers. The dream of any social media company.

I always assumed it folded because they couldn't agree on a path to monetization.

But from the perspective that they actually did care about it (which I read as they devoted significant resources to it even if that didn't translate to anything that was publicly visible)... It starts to sound more like a company that's hit the self hobbling critical mass of size and internal bureaucracy.

What did it look like from the inside?

[wutbrodo]

People were generally pretty irritated (as was the public) by the integration of every Google product into it. Leadership (both internally and externally) was pretty clear that it was meant to be a platform, one that unified all of Google's products with a shared social layer.

I worked in research at the time and have never been a heavy social media user, so it didn't really affect me much, but the internal story seems to fit reality more than what you're describing: the change in user facing functionality was progressive integration of Google products (like YouTube)

[BlueTemplar]

And Google broke their social network that was actually working (Google Reader), hoping that the now "homeless" users would flock to Google+.

I don't know why they thought that this kind of bullshit would work on "techies" (the core audience of Google Reader) - that just made them wake up and realize that Google's "Don't be Evil" motto was a sham...

[johnyzee]

> the social networking site everyone you know is on

As for Facebook the site, this is less and less true. I have kids cross different age ranges, and Facebook is not a thing at all for any of them or their social groups. And whenever someone wants to organize things via Facebook, there is always a lot of pushback from people who don't/won't use it.

Their other properties, Whatsapp and Instagram, are very popular, but they serve slightly different functions. So either there is a vacuum left from Facebook (the site), or the market has simply shifted and no longer wants a MySpace/Facebook type platform.

[hombre_fatal]

As another experience, I've yet to meet someone aged 20 and up that doesn't have Facebook neither in Texas nor Mexico and I'm meeting people constantly 20-40.

I'm sure they have Whatsapp, Instagram, and other apps, but I've never met someone who couldn't at least provide a Facebook profile when asked and then communicate with me on it.

It seems hard to draw on your kids' experiences until they at least enter university or the work force and are actually meeting new people. I never had a Snapchat until a cute woman asked me if I had one. Now I have one ready to go.

Facebook wasn't even available until I entered university, but that's also when the rolodex becomes useful. Not so much in highschool where, even in my massive school, I still wasn't meeting so many people nor had much control over my social life compared to uni.

So I'm wary of people extrapolating from what kids do. People have been saying the death of FB is just around the corner, "just look at what kids use" for years.

Of course, a lot of this also depends where you live, like how Americans will use iMessage while that's basically unheard of in other parts of the world.

[oarabbus_]

Google+ was... simply terrible. MySpace was a superior product for the end-user, much less FB.