Google wanted a pretty graph of humanity's friendships. So they worked really hard on making it nice to input those relationship through those pretty circles (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMZP-oyOII).
But inputting those vertices in the graph does not benefit users, and they feel that. In Facebook, it worked because Facebook had focused on the users: they wanted to be someone's friend to use Facebook's communication tools. And Facebook had a great chat system and a competent publishing platform.
G+ never had a great chat system (Hangout always felt sluggish, obtrusive and undifferentiated, unlike GTalk and Facebook Messenger) and its publishing platform was subpar (Medium came six months later, Tumblr had been around for seven years, both have a much superior editor and offer a more pleasing reading experience).
You can't beat the competition with a lesser core product.
Google wanted a pretty graph of humanity's friendships. So they worked really hard on making it nice to input those relationship through those pretty circles (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMZP-oyOII).
But inputting those vertices in the graph does not benefit users, and they feel that. In Facebook, it worked because Facebook had focused on the users: they wanted to be someone's friend to use Facebook's communication tools. And Facebook had a great chat system and a competent publishing platform.
G+ never had a great chat system (Hangout always felt sluggish, obtrusive and undifferentiated, unlike GTalk and Facebook Messenger) and its publishing platform was subpar (Medium came six months later, Tumblr had been around for seven years, both have a much superior editor and offer a more pleasing reading experience).
You can't beat the competition with a lesser core product.