Initially Google+ was invite only. Techie people wanted to get in. News outlets reported on it. Common people basically never had a shot at getting in until, what was it, like 5 or 6 months later? Google essentially created the largest amount of friction possible to join their new, hot, social network that everyone was talking about and then when they mostly stopped talking about it they opened it up.
Beyond the initial friction it had a surprising amount of speed bumps at the start. There were multiple times where it was simply down and they mentioned running out of storage space at least once. Google, the giant that scales everything to seemingly infinite to the common person, couldn't keep an invite only social network up.
They also didn't make it simple to get into. When you went to Google's homepage there was basically a tiny, tiny link at the top that probably a tiny fraction of people notice and that was it. It wasn't hooked into Gmail, Google's most used application. It wasn't hooked into Maps or even Google search! Even today it's still not hooked into ANY of these things to a degree in which you can interact with it.
I'm not sure who was in charge of Google+ at the time but whoever they are they either didn't understand social networking at all or they just wanted to kill Google+. I reject any other possibilities.
I really liked the way Google+ worked, too. I'm still pretty disappointed that it's essentially a failed project that Google will kill eventually.
Vic Gundotra was in charge. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, however, gave him full reign, and bear ultimate responsibility.
Google fundamentally do not get social interactions, period.
General access to G+ was a month or two after initial public beta. I argue that was too soon.
Facebook, by contrast, expanded from Harvard, to other Ivys and Stanford, selective admissions colleges, and finally general public access, over 2-3 years. It somewhat followed Usenet's development in this, and I think in both cases, the selective founding cohort and acculturalisation primed both networks for larger appeal.
Initially Google+ was invite only. Techie people wanted to get in. News outlets reported on it. Common people basically never had a shot at getting in until, what was it, like 5 or 6 months later? Google essentially created the largest amount of friction possible to join their new, hot, social network that everyone was talking about and then when they mostly stopped talking about it they opened it up.
Beyond the initial friction it had a surprising amount of speed bumps at the start. There were multiple times where it was simply down and they mentioned running out of storage space at least once. Google, the giant that scales everything to seemingly infinite to the common person, couldn't keep an invite only social network up.
They also didn't make it simple to get into. When you went to Google's homepage there was basically a tiny, tiny link at the top that probably a tiny fraction of people notice and that was it. It wasn't hooked into Gmail, Google's most used application. It wasn't hooked into Maps or even Google search! Even today it's still not hooked into ANY of these things to a degree in which you can interact with it.
I'm not sure who was in charge of Google+ at the time but whoever they are they either didn't understand social networking at all or they just wanted to kill Google+. I reject any other possibilities.
I really liked the way Google+ worked, too. I'm still pretty disappointed that it's essentially a failed project that Google will kill eventually.