Over Look Today: Goodbye Google+ A eulogy for the last great social network

Google delivered the news earlier this month in a blog post. The company gave multiple reasons for its decision: It found a security flaw in Google+, consumer engagement is low, and running a social site is hard. So it’s “sunsetting” Google+ for consumers in August, 2019. (The service will continue for business customers.) Over its 20-year history, Google has succeeded wildly with products in a great many businesses: Search, Gmail, YouTube, Android and others. But it tends to fail with products that involve public social interaction. In fact, it’s earned a reputation as something of a social site serial killer. High-profile failures include Orkut, Buzz, and Wave. But even more obscure social properties also got “sunsetted” by Google: Spaces, Profiles, Wildfire, Jaiku, Schemer, Lively, Hello, Dodgeball, Aardvark, Friend Connect, Latitude, Talk, Helpouts and others.

Google added social features to its Google Reader RSS product five years ago. Then the company killed it. Its blogging platform, Blogger, still exists. But it sure doesn’t feel like a strategic priority.

In truth, it’s likely that Google+ has been a dead social network walking since 2014. Since then, Google has stripped it for parts and terminated some of its best features.

In recent years, senior executives even stopped using it. Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s last post on Google+ was in March of 2016. When Pichai wants to post something, he turns to Twitter. So why wait this long to kill what is clearly a burden and embarrassment to Google? The answer is that Google+ still had some very devoted fans. But why?

The halcyon daysThe year 2011 was a year of radical change and uncertainty in Silicon Valley. Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs died that year. Facebook was preparing its IPO. And Eric Schmidt, who had served as Google CEO for a decade, was replaced by co-founder Larry Page.

Google faced a crisis. Facebook seemed to be eating the world—Google’s world. Facebook’s rapid rise was a harbinger of a future where Facebook might challenge Google’s dominance in online advertising and the future of mobile advertising.

Google+ represented a complete reversal of Google’s social strategy. Under Schmidt, the stated strategy was to build social into existing Google properties, by adding sharing features and a plus-one button to everything. Page turned the old strategy inside-out. Instead of adding social to Google services, the company would add Google services to a new social network.

Leading the project was former Microsoft executive Vic Gundotra. Together, Page and Gundotra essentially forced many other Google teams–and many Google users–kicking and screaming into Google+ integrations of every description.

The centrality of Google+ was best expressed by senior VP Bradley Horowitz. In 2012 he told Wired’s Steven Levy that “Google+ is Google itself. We’re extending it across all that we do—search, ads, Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube—so that each of those services contributes to our understanding of who you are.”

In Page’s first week as CEO, he issued an edict commanding that 25% of every Google employee’s bonus would be directly tied to the company’s success in social. Page’s idea was with such an incentive, employees would not only want to create innovative social features, but they’d also convince their family and friends to try new Google social services, including and especially the forthcoming Google+ social network.

Google+ opened up for invitation-only access in June 2011. In its early days, it attracted an optimistic collection of disaffected Facebook users, miscellaneous Twitter refugees, photographers, and Google superfans. Above all it proved alluring to aspiring influencers seeking to grab an early lead on a new social network which many thought would be the Next Big Thing.

And the site was better than Facebook in almost every way. The character maximum for Facebook posts back then was 500–less than twice what Twitter allows today. Google+ posts let you type up to 100,000 characters. You could write a novel in a post.

Pictures posted on Facebook then were compressed to the point of actually ruining them. Google+ photos looked like the originals. Photographers flocked to Google+.

At the time, Facebook allowed you only to “friend” people, which is to say you couldn’t follow them unless they followed you back. Google+ let you “follow” people, like Twitter.

The first version of Google+ allowed your stream to refresh automatically. Many users kept it open on their desktops to watch the posts go by as they worked all day.

The integrations were amazing. You could receive posts or comments in Gmail, and post from Gmail to Google+. And people could email you from within Google+ without ever knowing your email address. Hangouts and Hangouts on Air played live in posts, and people could comment on Hangouts in progress. The recordings of these Hangouts continued to live on as video posts.