Did Google+ really fail, though? It seemed to me that their primary goal was less about building a social network and more about preventing Facebook from owning the whole digital identity space: that is, Google+ was a response to the wave of "Log in with Facebook" buttons sweeping the web at the time. While the social network never took off, Google did successfully prevent Facebook from becoming a gateway to the web.
I'd love an explanation of what technical delivery failures--not the right functionality, or delivered too late--the author thinks led to G+ not beating Facebook.
I think its a bit of a resources curse. Google+ goes live and instantly they have tens to hundreds of millions of users.
If you bootstrapped a social media company and you have that many users, you'd likely read it as a signal that you're doing something right. But with Google that's baked in to their brand and connections with existing services. So it takes a lot of skill to tease out signal from noise. How many people actually find this valuable and how can we iterate? Again, its relatively straight forward for most companies by tracking a few key metrics, but with Google the dataset it just polluted.
It also wasn't existential for their survival. If Facebook failed, it would have brought down everything, so they were very much invested in the product and geared all resources to ensure survival. With Google+ it was just a feather in the cap and not a priority
I think the "resource curse" hypothesis is interesting, but there's also a simpler explanation: social networking is an _extremely_ sticky, winner-take-all market.
Google+ isn't the only competitor to fail to unseat Facebook. I think that says far more about Facebook than it does about Google+.