[dredmorbius]

A slow and phased community development worked really, really well for Facebook. Remember: it was deployed into a world already dominated by MySpace and with multiple rivals.

Slower, with a solid core community, would have been far better for G+ IMO. It opened up too fast.

Not only didn't it have a gelled community, but there were far too many UI / feature glitches and omissions. Many of which persist to this day.

[npizzolato]

But Facebook had a rather ingenious strategy for their slow rollout. They rolled out an entire college at the same time, so once Facebook was available for you, it was also available to a significant part of your friend group (the lifeblood of a social network). Google+ however just released slowly to a random set of people, so some people could get on, but none of their friends were there.