Where is Google Plus?

Launched in June 2011, Google Plus was an initiative by tech giant Google at creating it's own social networking platform; taking on established competition like Facebook. Social media services were growing rapidly and Google didn't want to miss out. 

Google plus allowed sharing posts and content and showed relevant content to users in their feed. It had a neat interface and was linked to most Google services to create a unified platform across Google services.

What happened to Google Plus?

While Google plus got a huge customer base in a short time; it was found that users spent very little time on it while Facebook got most of the market share. With low retention, shrinking customer base and security concerns amongst other issues; Google shut down Google plus service on 2nd April, 2019.

But what went wrong? 

Why did a tech giant with the best expertise fail in availing the growing popularity of social networking? 

There a lot of technical and behavioral reasons to this downfall as we will now see-

• To start with, Google plus never properly took off. While it maintained a small loyal customer base, most of the millions of subscribers on the platform had been compelled to join it as Google plus account was required in most Google services like YouTube, Gmail etc. The numbers didn't reflect customer retention, which soon turned out to be as low as few minutes per month.
• The infinite scrolling and content prioritisation features meant that users would keep scrolling through content without closure and often tuned off and missed out important content like personal messages if the prioritisation got it wrong. There was also no proper "mark as read" feature for the posts.
• Google plus didn't have a mutually accepted connection/following feature. The users would be linked in circles automatically based on algorithms even without their will. A
• Also, users didn't get proper feedback if their messages/posts were getting attention from targeted people and had no sure way of making their messages seen by the other.
• Finally, there were reports of user data breaches in 2018 with millions of users' data being partly compromised.
• As a result of the above issues, users felt compelled, unsatisfied and insecure using Google plus; while options like Facebook were meeting their needs very well. 
• Corrections like removing compulsory account linking, adding direct messaging options, correcting vulnerabilities and assuring security etc. were either ineffective or too late.

Hence, Google went for shutting down the service on April 2, 2019.

The problem behind the problem

What about the many experts and software engineers? Couldn't  they see the problems and make quick corrections? The best explanation for this slow death is the "group think" phenomenon, where people start confirming to a general idea without raising questions to avoid conflict. 

What can we learn?

From understanding user needs well and following successful examples to ensuring user data security and taking democratic decisions; we clearly have a lot to learn from the failure of Google Plus.

Authored by- Praharsh Chaubey

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