It's possible though that people are just losing interest in the type of experience Facebook provides. If that is the case then Google+ just arrived at the wrong time. No matter how good it is if the audience is losing interest in the whole concept it won't do well. So the relative failure of Google+ might not indicate that Facebook is in a strong position, but that rather the whole "social industry" is in a weakening position.

Google+ is not a fundamentally different experience from Facebook. It's slightly different, and that isn't enough.

The launch for google+ was so upsetting and disappointing. I oh so badly wanted to tell my friends/family to join me on it, but I didn't care enough to make an account separate from my google apps account, which were restricted from google+ for quite a while. I know I'm an incredibly small fish in a big pond, but I believe a significant percentage of google apps users would have gladly evangelized for google.

Was the product itself really so disappointing, or was it more that people have just grown tired of social networking? It seems like Facebook may just be coasting on momentum and when Google+ arrived people just didn't have any motivation to sign up for yet another social network.

I made no mention of the product itself. InclinedPlane below further elaborates.

I think the biggest problem with google+'s launch was not the product or that people have grown tired of social networking, but the launch itself. First, they screwed up support for google apps users which is a huge mistake, that is the core of the most dedicated and tech savvy google supporters, alienating them on launch was a disaster. Second, the slow rollout through limited and controlled invitations was unhelpful for a service of that sort. If they had scaled up earlier the launch would have gone much better.

Facebook is rife for disruption, the fact that google hasn't been able to pull it off doesn't mean that it isn't possible. Few of facebook's users love facebook, they use it because that's where everyone they care about is. Almost the entire value of the site is due to network effect and a merely competent execution of the site's core features.

Google imagines that they can take away marketshare from facebook by implementing mostly the same featureset with only a few changes that only a tiny proportion of people care about (with the exception of hangouts, which so far is google+'s killer feature). But that sort of tactic only works if you can bribe 51% of the userbase over to your side in the first place. In that case then everyone else would follow, but in trying to disrupt an entrenched competitor it's going to be an uphill battle at best.

There are two ways to disrupt facebook, I think. One: on technology / featureset. Facebook has a terrible mobile app, that's an easy weakness to exploit. Google+'s hangouts are another aspect of adding features that facebook lacks. If you manage to come up with enough compelling features and qualities perhaps you can get people to switch. Two: socially. Facebook is a very one-size-fits-all system for social networking, but that's not the way social networks in the real world view themselves. For example, a site, or federation of sites, that more explicitly catered to different interests through layout, graphic design and branding, feature-choice, etc. could have a higher appeal to certain groups than facebook. A lot of facebook's appeal is because it is, or was, perceived as "cool", if other sites can change that perception then they can drain traffic away from facebook. Maybe not all of it, but if a thousand different sites each take a thousandth of FB's traffic, then what happens?

The most naive assumption is that facebook won't be disrupted. Nearly every online company is going to be disrupted in the next decade, the question is whether or not those companies can respond to it effectively and manage to survive.