The usual motivation for making new products is to satisfy users' needs, to make their lives better. Google didn't make Google+ to give value to consumers. They made it because they feared Facebook.* Without Facebook, there would be no Google+. That's the fundamental problem – Google+ provides value only to a minority of Google users – why force it down everyone's throats?
As Steve Yegge said: "Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful."
Google still doesn't understand social and people. Facebook is successful because it feeds on (or exploits?) specific psychological needs. Technology and user interface are secondary factors.
* To be more specific, I think that the #1 reason they've built Google+ was to extract friend lists (social graph), because they've thought that this data can improve their other products. Their line of thinking was "If Facebook has social data and we don't, they'll be able to make a better search engine or an ad network." They've seen this as a big threat to their core business. But making a product just to exctract data is doomed to fail.
Facebook is successful because it is successful. Google+ can serve the same psychological needs, unfortunately it's third in a market in which Facebook and Twitter happened first.
Facebook itself was third to market in social networking, after Friendster and MySpace. The latter was heavily entrenched and very successful when Facebook started unseating it.
G+ definitely suffered by coming to market after FB and Twitter, but that's not the whole of the story. More specifically, it came to market after Facebook and Twitter, without doing anything fundamentally different, better, or more useful than Facebook or Twitter. (Circles, the putative differentiating factor, added more of a burden than a solution to the standard social networking UX.)
Late entrants can sometimes win; Google and Facebook were pretty far from the first movers in their respective markets. The key is that late entrants need to be significantly better than anyone who's come before them. G+ was not.
> Circles, the putative differentiating factor, added more of a burden than a solution to the standard social networking UX.
+1 I like what Yishan Wong (ex-Facebook executive) said about circles:
"if it represents the leading edge of thought regarding social networking within Google ... that seem to indicate that Google's ability to design and deploy a successful social networking product is further behind than previously thought"
The usual motivation for making new products is to satisfy users' needs, to make their lives better. Google didn't make Google+ to give value to consumers. They made it because they feared Facebook.* Without Facebook, there would be no Google+. That's the fundamental problem – Google+ provides value only to a minority of Google users – why force it down everyone's throats?
As Steve Yegge said: "Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful."
Google still doesn't understand social and people. Facebook is successful because it feeds on (or exploits?) specific psychological needs. Technology and user interface are secondary factors.
* To be more specific, I think that the #1 reason they've built Google+ was to extract friend lists (social graph), because they've thought that this data can improve their other products. Their line of thinking was "If Facebook has social data and we don't, they'll be able to make a better search engine or an ad network." They've seen this as a big threat to their core business. But making a product just to exctract data is doomed to fail.