> I mean, I stick around for the few people and one community that isn't on Facebook. But G+ is a huge planned subdivision built in a desert, all the roads built but no houses, with a few people camped out around a fire going "WELL THERE'S LOTS OF PEOPLE AROUND THIS FIRE."
It can be (there's a Linux fire and an RPG fire, for example). The fundamental problem for me, as another long-time user, is that they started right ("G+ is Facebook you can control sanely") that then progressed into so many of the things people hate about Facebook (trying to ram it into places you didn't want it, the real names policy, and so on). Once they eroded the perception that G+ was a privacy-enhanced Facebook, it was a dead man walking.
I think the nymwars was the tipping point: they alienated specifically their seed audience of techies (people who had friends at Google to give them an invite), and those techies told everyone they knew "STAY AWAY". That's when I first heard the list of excuses I give there (particularly "it's hugely popular in some sector you don't have numbers for!").
I mean, bloody hell. People desperately wanted Facebook the application without Facebook the company. Google could have had that if they just hadn't fucked up and hadn't gotten greedy.
This is the sort of thing that says "never employ an ex-Microsoft exec under any circumstances". Just how much destruction of Google's brand was Vic Gundotra responsible for?
It can be (there's a Linux fire and an RPG fire, for example). The fundamental problem for me, as another long-time user, is that they started right ("G+ is Facebook you can control sanely") that then progressed into so many of the things people hate about Facebook (trying to ram it into places you didn't want it, the real names policy, and so on). Once they eroded the perception that G+ was a privacy-enhanced Facebook, it was a dead man walking.