So, April 2nd, 2019. Does that date, does it
ring a bell for you at all? For most people,
probably not, right? It was just another Tuesday.
Yeah, I guess so. You know, maybe you grabbed
a sandwich, went to the gym. But in the history
of the internet, and I mean specifically in the,
you know, the big dusty annals of Silicon Valley
history, it marks the end of a very specific,
and I have to say a very... expensive and chaotic
era. That is the day Google Plus was officially
shut down for consumers. Oh, that's the one.
The day they finally pulled the plug, wiped the
servers, and all those profiles just vanished
into the ether. It's the death of a giant, really,
or at least what was supposed to be a giant.
Right. It's the final chapter in a story that
cost, I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars
and involves some of the absolute smartest engineers
on the planet. It's incredible. And that's exactly
what we're unpacking in this deep dive. We're
going to look at the rise and I guess the spectacular
fall of Google Plus A. Which was their fourth
attempt. Right. Their fourth. And let's be honest,
by far their most ambitious attempt at building
a social network. This was not a side project.
No, no. This was a company betting initiative.
All hands on deck. It is such a fascinating case
study because of the just the sheer scale of
the contradiction here. The paradox. Yeah. You're
looking at a platform that on paper was reporting
hundreds of millions of active users. At one
point, it was technically the second largest
social network in the world. I mean, it was nipping
at Facebook's heels, numerically speaking. And
yet at the exact same time, what was the label
everyone used? A ghost town. A ghost town. Yeah.
That's the central mystery we have to explore.
How do you have half a billion users and yet
no one is there? How is the user base larger
than the entire population of the United States?
But the cultural impact is like a tumbleweed
blowing through an empty street. It's an amazing
question. It's such a wild story. And we're not
just talking about a failed website here. We're
going to get into a full -blown corporate war
with Facebook. A really controversial real names
policy that just made people furious. Oh, the
NIMWARS. Yes. And... The Bob army invading YouTube,
which is a story I honestly cannot wait to get
into. And of course, you can't forget the final
nail in the coffin. The massive data breach.
The security failure that basically gave Google
the excuse they needed to finally, you know,
put the whole thing out of its misery. OK, so
let's rewind. Yeah. We have to set the stage.
Let's go all the way back to 2011. What was the
vibe in the tech world then? Well. In a word,
fear, at least, you know, inside the Googleplex
in Mountain View. Oh, yeah. You got to remember,
2011, the Internet was just a completely different
landscape. Facebook wasn't just like a popular
site. Right. It was becoming the Internet for
a huge, huge chunk of the population. Because
Google's whole mission was, what, to organize
the world's information. Exactly. Google owned
the what? You want to know the capital of Peru?
You ask Google. You want a recipe for lasagna?
Google, they had the graph of information. But
Facebook. Facebook was organizing the world's
people. They owned the who. And that terrified
Google. It was a genuine existential threat.
Think about it. If people stop searching for
best pizza in New York on Google and they just
start asking their friends on Facebook, hey,
where should I get dinner tonight? Then Google's
whole business model starts to crumble. The whole
thing. Their model is based on serving ads against
search intent. If the intent moves to a walled
garden like Facebook, they're in big trouble.
So they didn't just want a social network for
fun or to be cool. No, they needed the data.
They needed what they called the social graph.
They had to know who you knew, who you trusted,
what your relationships were. Without that, they
were basically flying blind into the new era
of the web. There's this book by a former Facebook
employee, Antonio Garcia Martinez. It's called
Chaos Monkeys. Oh, a fantastic book. And he actually
describes the reaction inside Facebook when Google
Plus launched. The lockdown story. This is like
Silicon Valley legend at this point. It is. So
tell us about that. Because we usually think
of Google as the big bad wolf. But in this story,
Facebook was the one sweating. oh they were panicking
according to the book the moment google plus
was announced Mark Zuckerberg initiated a company
-wide lockdown. And that wasn't just a figure
of speech. Not at all. It was like an air raid
siren went off inside the company. The implication
was that Google, with its infinite money, its
infinite resources, and literally the smartest
engineers in the world, was finally coming for
them. So nobody leaves the building until we
kill this thing. Pretty much. Zuckerberg apparently
gathered all the employees around this famous
lockdown sign, and he gave a speech. And he channeled
Cato the Elder. The Roman senator. Yeah, the
one who ended every single speech with, Carthage
must be destroyed. And he saw Google as Carthage.
He saw it as a war for their very survival. Employees
were basically told to dedicate all their time,
nights, weekends, everything, to bringing Facebook's
features up to par with what Google was doing.
They genuinely thought Google might just crush
them. It's so funny in retrospect, isn't it?
Yeah. Knowing how it all played out. It really
is. But at the time, Google already had a bit
of a... a graveyard of social attempts right
this wasn't their first rodeo Not at all. They
had this string of failures that really set the
stage for why Google Plus just had to succeed.
I mean, first we had Google Wave. RIP Wave. Yeah.
I still maintain Wave was just ahead of its time.
It was basically Slack before Slack existed.
It was incredibly complex, though. It tried to
be email and instant messaging and a collaboration
tool all at once, and I think it just confused
everybody. Fair enough. Then there was Google
Buzz. Oh, Buzz. The privacy disaster. That was
a huge one, right? It was built into Gmail. A
huge disaster. It launched inside Gmail and it
automatically made you follow the people you
emailed the most. Oh, no. Which sounds kind of
convenient until you realize that people email
their ex -spouses, their therapists, their business
rivals, maybe a secret lover. And it just exposed
all those private networks to the public. It
did. And they got sued for it big time. And then,
of course, there was Orkut. I actually loved
Orkut. But it was mostly big in Brazil and India,
wasn't it? Huge in Brazil and India. It was a
genuine cultural phenomenon there. But it never,
ever captured the U .S. market. And for a U .S.-centric
company like Google, that just wasn't enough.
So by June 28, 2011, the pressure's on. Larry
Page had just taken over as CEO, and he made
social a top, top priority. Enter Google plus
Brugas. It was led by two executives, Vitka Notra
and Bradley Horowitz. And the message from the
top was crystal clear. This is the one that is
going to work. This is not another side project.
And Vic Gondotra was a very charismatic leader,
right? He was the public face of this. He was.
He was the one who really pushed this vision.
And the pitch wasn't just, you know, Facebook,
but with a different color scheme. They had a
very specific philosophy. This is the social
layer concept. OK, let's unpack this, because
I really think it's the key to understanding
both why it was so ambitious and why it ultimately
failed. It absolutely is. Vik Gundotra and his
team, they didn't just want to build another
destination website like Facebook .com, where
you scroll for 20 minutes and then you leave.
They wanted to build... a social layer that would
sit on top of literally everything google did
like a blanket just thrown over the entire google
ecosystem that's the perfect metaphor think about
your average google usage you're using search
you're using maps gmail youtube drive android
right they're all separate things but the idea
was that google plus would be the connective
tissue you wouldn't just be a youtube watcher
or a gmail user anymore you would be a google
plus user who just happened to be checking their
email so that little red notification bell that
we all remember that would follow you from your
email to your map to your search result that
was the visual representation of it a single
unified identity if you shared a location from
maps you did it through google plus seri if you
commented on a youtube video you did it through
google plus seri it was this attempt to unify
all these separate disparate products under one
single social umbrella. Which, you know, from
a corporate strategy perspective, it's actually
kind of brilliant. You tie all your assets together.
But from a user perspective. It felt a little
invasive. To say the least. But before we get
to the backlash, we should probably give credit
where credit is due. We should. The product itself,
I mean, the actual interface of Google plus Matt.
It was full of some really interesting, even
groundbreaking innovations. Oh, for sure. The
biggest one being circles. Circles. That was
the core differentiator, wasn't it? The thing
they hung their entire hat on. It was. And I
remember this so vividly. The interface was actually
like really satisfying. You had these little
bubbles that represented your friends. You would
physically or will digitally drag and drop them
into these circles. Friends, family. And there
was a real logic to it, a kind of sociological
logic. You have to think about Facebook at the
time. Their model was totally reciprocal and
binary. I friend you, you friend me, we are now
friends, full stop. Yeah, right. And it doesn't
matter if you're my best friend from kindergarten
or, you know, my boss who I'm secretly terrified
of. You're both in the exact same bucket. And
that creates what sociologists call... Context
collapse. It means all your different social
contexts, your work life, your family life, your
party life, they all just collapse into a single
feed. And that creates a chilling effect. Because
you don't want to share your photos from the
bar on Saturday night because your boss might
see them. Exactly. And you don't want to share
some boring article about spreadsheets because
all your friends from college will be bored to
death. So you end up just sharing nothing. Or
just really safe vanilla stuff like happy birthday,
Aunt Carol. Precisely. And circles was Google's
way of saying, hey, social life isn't binary.
You share different things with different groups
of people. So you should be able to post a photo
just to your college buddies circle and an article
just to your work colleagues circle. It was smart.
I mean, it really acknowledged nuance. It was
very smart. The problem, which I think we all
realized pretty quickly, is that managing all
that nuance. It's work. That's the catch, isn't
it? It requires cognitive load. You have to actually
sit there and sort every single human being,
you know, into a specific bucket. Yeah. Is Dave
a friend or is he an acquaintance? And if I put
him in acquaintance, is he going to know? Is
he going to be offended? It's stressful. Dragging
people into circles was fun for like the first
10 minutes because the animation was cool and
made that little clunk sound. I remember that.
But then it just felt like digital filing. It
felt like doing your taxes. Whereas Facebook,
for all its problems, was just low friction.
You add someone, you're done. Google Plus required
you to be the librarian of your own social life.
Exactly. But they had other features, too, that
were genuinely ahead of their time. Let's talk
about Hangouts. Okay, Hangouts was legit amazing.
This was 2011. Yeah, this was years before Zoom
became a verb. Years. At the time, if you wanted
to do a video chat, you used Skype. And Skype
was mostly one -to -one unless you wanted to
pay for their premium features. Right. Hangouts
offered multi -person video chat for free right
in the browser. No clunky downloads. And people
really used it. I remember recording podcasts
on Hangouts. I knew Dungeons and Dragons groups
that ran their entire campaigns on Hangouts.
It was built on early WebRTC technology. It was
pretty seamless. You could have 10 people on
a call. It really democratized video conferencing
for consumers. That was a real stickiness factor
that Google Plus had over Facebook at the time.
And then there was photos. The unsung hero. Or,
well, maybe the sung hero, since it's the part
that actually survived. True. They had cloud
-based albums and these really cool editing tools.
Do you remember Auto Awesome? I do. It sounded
like a silly marketing gimmick, but it was actually
some pretty powerful machine learning under the
hood. How did that work again? You'd upload a
burst of photos, say like five pictures of your
kid jumping into a swimming pool. Google servers
would analyze them and then automatically stitch
them together into a GIF animation. Oh, right.
Or if you took a group photo and somebody was
blinking in one frame, but they were smiling
in another, it could merge them to create like
the perfect shot where everyone looks good. It
felt like magic at the time. It was computational
photography before that was even a buzzword.
It really was. And that technology was highly,
highly praised. A lot of professional... Photographers
actually flocked to Google +, just because the
image compression was so much better than Facebook's.
Your photos just looked better there. And then
we had the plus one button. Their answer to the
like button. But it wasn't just for posts inside
Google +, was it? No, and this goes right back
to that social layer concept. The plus one button
was designed to be spread all across the web.
You'd see it on news sites, on blogs, on e -commerce
stores. The idea was that you could recommend
content across the entire Internet and all of
that data would feed back into Google's search
and social graph. It was like they were trying
to paint the entire Web with their own colors.
That's a great way to put it. And there was one
more thing. Ah, Sparks. I totally forgot about
Sparks. Most people did. It was a feature that
was removed by, I think, November of 2012. It
was basically a front end for Google search that
was designed to find shareable topics. Oh, to
solve the empty feed problem. Exactly. You pick
an interest like cycling or baking, and it would
just feed you articles to share with your circles.
It never really took off. So on paper, this sounds
amazing. You've got better privacy controls with
circles. You've got better video with Hangouts,
better photo tools, and the full might of Google
search behind it. Right. And the launch numbers,
they reflected that excitement, didn't they?
Oh, they did. The growth was explosive. I mean,
historic, really. Two weeks after it launched,
they had 10 million users. Wow. Two weeks. By
the end of 2011, so just a few months later,
90 million. That is incredibly fast. It was the
fastest uptake of a social network ever up to
that point. And by October 2013, they were reporting
540 million monthly active users. 540 million.
Half a billion people. So if you just hear that
number, you'd think game over, Facebook. You'd
think the war was won. You absolutely would.
But this is where we have to put on our detective
hats and really dig into that ghost town reality
check. Right. Because in the tech world, the
definition of an active user can be, let's say,
malleable. It's like the difference between having
a gym membership and actually doing a squat.
Two very different things. That's the perfect
analogy. There's a famous set of data that came
out from Comscore in January 2012. This was about
six months after the launch. Really? They looked
at the average time a user spent on the site
per month. Not just did you log in, but how long
did you actually stay? Okay, hit me with a comparison.
Facebook versus Google plus Fort. All right.
On Facebook, the average user was spending seven
and a half hours per month. Seven and a half
hours. Okay. That's a lot of scrolling. It is.
And on Google Plus, 3 .3 minutes. Minutes. Minutes.
Wait, hold on. 3 .3 minutes per month. Per month.
That's barely enough time to load the page. That's
like you accidentally click a link, realize where
you are, and immediately close the tab. That
is essentially what was happening. And that was
the engagement gap. And then in February 2014,
the New York Times ran this huge article that
officially likened Google Plus to a ghost town.
And they had data to back that up. They did.
They noted that nearly half of the so -called
active users didn't actually visit the site at
all. So how could Google possibly claim 540 million
users if nobody was visiting? I mean, were they
just lying? Not lying, exactly, but defining
user in a way that served their narrative. It
goes right back to the social layer. If you signed
up for Gmail, what happened? You got a Google
Plus account automatically. If you commented
on a YouTube video, boom, you were technically
using Google Plus way. If you click the plus
one button on some random blog you were reading,
that counted as a social interaction. I see.
So they were basically inflating the numbers.
by counting anyone who even touched a Google
product as a social user. And Google's defense
was, you know, the value isn't just in the stream
the news feed part, but in gathering all this
identity data across all of our services, we're
unifying the experience. But to the outside world,
and maybe more critically to advertisers, it
just looked like an empty stadium. You can force
everyone to have a ticket, but you can't force
them to actually watch the game. Exactly. And
it wasn't just that it was empty. The people
who were there, well... Google managed to make
a lot of them really, really angry. Which brings
us to the controversies. And there were a few,
but the biggest one early on, the one that really
poisoned the well from the start, was the NIMWARS.
NIMWARS. The War on Pseudonyms. This was a massive
ideological battle. When they launched in July
2011, Google Plus had a strict policy. You had
to use your real name, like the name on your
driver's license. Which just seems very strict,
doesn't it? Incredibly strict. And the enforcement
was really aggressive. Accounts were getting
suspended left and right if they used pseudonyms
or nicknames or even stage names. So if I'm a
gamer and my handle is Dragonslayer99, I can't
be Dragonslayer99 on Google Plus Home. You have
to be John Smith. And if you're a musician known
to the world as Lady Gaga... You have to be Stefani
Germanotta. And this went so much deeper than
just gamers and pop stars, right? I mean, think
about political activists. For sure. Think about
people living in dangerous political climates
who absolutely need anonymity to speak freely.
Or think about victims of domestic abuse who
do not want to be found by their abusers. Oh,
right. It's a huge safety issue. A massive one.
It was a massive backlash about privacy and safety.
Google's logic was that they wanted a clean environment
for advertisers. You know, real people, real
data, high accountability. They thought anonymity
just bred toxicity. But the Internet culture
just revolted against that. Completely. They
saw it as Google trying to impose some kind of
corporate ID card on the wild, messy web. So
they backed down. Eventually. But it was a really
slow, painful retreat. They started supporting
pseudonyms in January 2012. And then by July
2014, they finally dropped the name restriction
entirely. But the damage was done. By then, the
reputation of the platform was set. It was seen
as the man. It was the narc at the party who's
asking to see your ID. And speaking of being
hostile to Internet culture. Yeah. We have to
talk about YouTube. The 2013 integration disaster.
This is one for the history books. This might
be the moment I remember most clearly from the
whole saga. November 6, 2013. The day Google
decides that, from now on, to comment on a YouTube
video, you must have a Google Plus account. Why?
I mean, why would you force that? YouTube was
doing just fine on its own. Well, the rationale
was actually somewhat noble, if you kind of squint
at it. They wanted to clean up the cesspool of
YouTube comments. I mean, that's a fair point.
YouTube comments are legendary for being just
awful. And the logic was... If we force people
to use their real identities via Google +, the
trolling will stop. You know, people behave better
when their real name is attached to their words.
Okay, that makes sense. Did it work? It backfired
so spectacularly. It was a full -scale revolt.
The YouTube community, which just prizes anonymity
and freedom of expression, absolutely hated it.
And this is where Bob comes in. Yes. the ASCII
art army. You have to explain this for people
who maybe weren't spending their life in comment
sections back in 2013. So users started spamming
the comment sections with ASCII art pictures
that are made out of text characters. Right.
And specifically, they were images of tanks and
little stick figures. And the stick figure was
always named Bob. A stick figure army. And the
text would usually say something like, this is
Bob. Bob is building an army to fight against
Google Plus. It was this massive coordinated
protest. The comment sections became completely
unusable. So instead of cleaning up the spam,
the integration just increased it exponentially.
It was basically a denial of service attack carried
out by the users against their own platform.
And it wasn't just the trolls, was it? Even the
founders of YouTube were mad. Oh, yeah. Jad Karim,
one of the co -founders, he hadn't posted on
his own channel in years. He came back to the
very first video ever uploaded to YouTube, me
at the zoo, and he posted a comment. What did
he say? He said, why the fangpay do I need a
Google Plus account to comment on a video? Wow.
When the literal founder of the platform is dropping
F -bombs on your new feature, you know you've
messed up. It just highlighted the fundamental
problem. Google was prioritizing its own business
goal, which was growing Google Plus over the
user experience of its other much more successful
products. They were willing to actively degrade
YouTube just to prop up Google Plus traffic.
Exactly. And they were doing the same thing with
search, too. Right. Search plus your world. Sounds
like a cheesy marketing slogan, doesn't it? It
really does. So what was it? It was a feature
where they started inserting Google Plus content
and profiles directly into the general Google
web search results. So if I search for something
like pizza, I might see my friend's Google Plus
post about pizza. Exactly. And more importantly,
if you searched for a person's name, their Google
Plus profile would show up prominently on the
right -hand side, often above their Twitter or
their Facebook or their LinkedIn profile. That
feels a little unfair. Well, the criticism was
that it was blatantly anti -competitive. They
were favoring their own social network over more
relevant results from Twitter or Flick or Facebook.
It started to attract the attention of antitrust
regulators. It did. It looked like they were
using their monopoly in search to bully their
way into the social market. The classic putting
your thumb on the scale. And there's one more
controversy that's just a bizarre little anecdote.
The Obama campaign spam. This one is so strange.
I haven't heard this one. So in 2012, for reasons
that are still kind of mysterious, the restrictions
on Google Plus in China were suddenly relaxed.
Just for a moment. Which is weird because usually
the Great Firewall blocks most Google services.
Exactly. And so Chinese users realized they could
suddenly access it. And they all flooded Barack
Obama's official Google Plus campaign page. With
what? Messages of support? With everything. Jokes,
off -topic comments, calls for political liberation,
just random memes. They effectively occupied
the page. It was this sudden, chaotic influx
of users from a region where the service was
normally blocked. It just showed how unpredictable
and unstable these platforms can be when the
floodgates suddenly open. So we have the ghost
town metrics. We have the angry YouTubers, the
pseudonym wars, the antitrust concerns. It really
feels like the writing is on the wall at this
point. When did the pivot finally happen? When
did they basically admit defeat? It all started
around 2014. The first big domino to fall was
Vic Gundotra. The father of Google Plus plan.
The man whose vision this entire project was.
He departs the company in April of 2014. And
when the captain leaves the ship? The ship is
usually in trouble. So the leadership shuffles
a bit. David Besbrys takes over for a short time
and then Bradley Horowitz steps in by 2015. And
Horowitz is the one who announces a huge shift.
This is the great unbundling. Correct. Google
finally realized that the social layer strategy,
the idea of forcing everything to be Google plus
Ed, was failing. In fact, it was actively hurting
their other products. So they decided to break
it apart. They decided to take... The good parts,
the parts people actually liked, and let them
live on their own. Right. So in May 2015, at
their big Google I .O. conference, they announced
Google Photos as a completely standalone product.
Which was a massive, massive success. Huge. It's
still one of their best and most beloved products
today. They realized people wanted the unlimited
photo storage and the cool A .I. editing tools,
but they did not want the social network that
was attached to it. And Hangouts also moved to
be a standalone service. It did. So what happened
to the actual social network part, you know,
the stream? It was refocused. They did a big
redesign in November of 2015, and they shifted
the focus entirely to communities and collections.
Collections sounds a bit like Pinterest. It was
very much a Pinterest -style curation feature,
and communities were just topic -based groups.
They tried to pivot from connect with everyone
you know, which, you know. Facebook had clearly
won to connect with people who like the same
weird stuff that you do. Which is actually a
totally valid strategy. It's what Reddit is.
It's what Discord is. It is. And to be fair to
the Google Plus team, for a while there was this
dedicated core user base that really loved this
new version. You know, photographers, Linux enthusiasts,
tabletop gamers. It became a much... quieter,
more interest based network. But I'm guessing
quieter doesn't really pay the bills at Google
scale. No. And it definitely doesn't justify
the massive infrastructure cost of running the
thing. But what ultimately killed it, it wasn't
the lack of users. It was the liability. Security
failures. OK, this is the final demise. Project
Strobe. That sounds like a techno thriller movie.
The Strobe Protocol. It really does. So Project
Strobe was a big internal review of all developer
access to Google accounts. This was 2018. And
privacy was suddenly a huge topic. Right. GDPR
was coming in Europe. Cambridge Analytica just
happened with Facebook. So Google is, you know,
checking its own house for leaks. And they found
one. They found a big one. In the spring of 2018,
they discovered a bug in the Google Plus API.
And the API is what lets other apps talk to Google
Plus way, right? Exactly. Like, if you play a
mobile game and it says, log in with Google Plus
to save your high score, that game is using the
API. And the bug allowed these third -party apps
to access non -public profile fields. Like what
kind of fields? Things like your name, email
address, occupation, gender, age. Even if the
user had specifically set those fields to be
private in their settings. Oof. That is a huge
breach of trust. How many people were affected?
Potentially hundreds of thousands. The estimate
was up to 500 ,000 accounts. But the real scandal
wasn't just the bug. I mean, software has bugs.
The scandal was Google's reaction to it. The
cover up. Right. The Wall Street Journal broke
the story that Google chose not to disclose the
breach immediately. They found it. They patched
it. But they didn't tell anyone. Fear of regulatory
scrutiny. an internal memo leaked and it basically
said that disclosing it would draw immediate
comparisons to facebook's cambridge analytica
scandal and it would invite this huge unwanted
spotlight from regulators so they just stayed
quiet that is not a good look no it looks incredibly
guilty and then as if the universe has a very
dark sense of irony in december of 2018 they
found a second bug You are kidding me. A software
update introduced another API bug, and this one
affected 52 .5 million users. 52 million. That
is a massive jump from 500 ,000. For six days,
app developers could access private data that
they shouldn't have been able to see. Okay, that
has to be the final nail. It was. Google announced
the shutdown almost immediately. Originally,
they had planned for a slow sunset ending in
August 2019, but after that second breach, they
moved the date up to April 2, 2019. They just
wanted it gone. It had become a toxic asset.
They officially cited low usage, and they shared
that stat that 90 % of user sessions lasted less
than five seconds and the extreme difficulty
of maintaining the product securely. They basically
said, look. Nobody is using this, and it's creating
a massive security hole for us. We're out. So
was there a lawsuit? Because 52 million people
having their data exposed usually leads to a
few lawyers getting involved. There was indeed
a class action lawsuit. It eventually settled
for $7 .5 million. $7 .5 million. For a company
the size of Google, that sounds low. It's pocket
change. And when you divide that amount by the
number of people who actually filed a claim.
How much did people get? If you filed a claim
and it was approved, you received a payment of
about $2 .15. $2 .15. Yes. That's the official
value of our Google Plus privacy, I guess. It's
symbolic at best. It'll buy you a very, very
small coffee. So April 2019, it's all shut down.
The consumer version is wiped from existence.
Users were told to download their data using
Google Takeout. Which is a whole project in itself.
If you've ever used Takeout, you know you just
get these giant zip files full of inscrutable
JSON data. It's not exactly user -friendly. Yeah.
But the tech didn't completely disappear, did
it? We mentioned photos. Photos is the big survivor.
It took the best of the image algorithms and
just became a staple product for them. What about
on the business side of things? Right. So Google
Plus for G Suite, the enterprise version, it
didn't die immediately. It was rebranded as Google
Currents. Currents. I feel like I've heard that
name from Google before. They love recycling
names. Yeah. There was an old app called Currents
that was a newsreader. But this new Currents
was meant for internal business communication,
sort of like a corporate Facebook. And did that
last? Nope. It was eventually shut down and folded
into Google Chat in 2023. They merged it into
the Spaces feature. And there was one more attempt,
right, after it all died. Something called Shoelace.
Ah, Shoelace, yes. It launched in July 2019,
just a few months after Google Plus was buried.
It was a very experimental app from Area 120,
which is Google's internal incubator. And what
was the idea behind that? It was all about organizing
local events and activities. The idea was to
tie people together like shoelaces you it was
strictly mobile strictly local it was really
trying to be the anti Facebook small groups focused
on real -world interaction let me guess it didn't
work well just look at the timeline It launched
in mid -2019. It was an app designed to get people
to meet up in person. And then 2020 happened.
By May 2020, the pandemic is raging. It's kind
of hard to launch an app about meeting strangers
in person when the entire world goes into lockdown.
That is just spectacularly bad luck. It really
is. So, yeah, it was shut down. Okay, so let's
wrap this all up. We have gone from Facebook
killer to ghost town to security risk. What is
the ultimate legacy here? What's the big takeaway?
I think the biggest lesson is the absolute failure
of forcing social. You just can't make people
be friends. You can't. You can build the features.
Circles were smart. Photos are beautiful. Hangouts
were genuinely useful. But you cannot mandate
the social connection itself. It's like they
treated their users like inventory. We have these
millions of people. Let's just move them over
to this new product. Exactly. And people resent
that. Social networks are these delicate, organic
ecosystems. They have to grow from genuine desire,
not from corporate obligation. And looking back
on it all now, Google Plus might have been right
about one thing. Oh, yeah. What's that? The circles.
Hmm. How so? Well, look at how we actually use
social media today. People are posting less and
less on their public feeds, like on Facebook
or X. Where is the real conversation happening
now? It's in group chats. It's in Discord servers,
Slack communities, close friends, stories on
Instagram, WhatsApp groups. Exactly. We are using
circles. We're just not doing it under one single
corporate roof. We want those small, specific,
context -aware groups. We want to share the dumb
meme with our friends and the baby photo with
our grandma and never have the two meet. That
is a fascinating point. Google Plus actually
predicted the future fragmentation of social
media, that desire for privacy and context. But
they tried to execute it in a way that just felt
unnatural and corporate. They built the right
house, but they put it in a neighborhood nobody
actually wanted to live in. And then they locked
the doors and told everyone they had to stay.
Not the best strategy for building a community.
Not at all. So here's a final provocative thought
for you to chew on. Google Plus failed because
it tried to be this layer on top of everything.
It wanted to be the single identity passport
for the entire Internet. Right. But today, what
do we use to log into everything? We use sign
in with Google. We use Google Photos to back
up our memories. Right. We use YouTube. We use
Gmail. We do. All of those things. So in a weird
way, did they actually win? The social network
died, but that identity layer is stronger than
it has ever been. Did they end up getting what
they really wanted, the data, the tracking, the
identity graph, just without the constant headache
of having to run a news feed? That is a very
provocative question. They lost the battle for
your attention, but maybe they won the war for
your identity. Something to think about the next
time you click that sign in with Google button.
Thanks for listening to this deep dive. Until
next time.