The rise and fall of Google+

It looks like Google+ is living on borrowed time: Google is unshackling its stuttering social network from other services like YouTube and the new Google Photos. It would be an innocuous end for the service that was heralded as a major part of Google's modern vision for the Web, a service that was designed to take on the might of Facebook and tie together everything from Gmail to Android at the same time.

And Google gave it everything it had. It was launched in the summer of 2011, designed to succeed where previous social networks like Orkut and Buzz had failed, and backed by the biggest names in the company. Google devoted a huge team of engineers and a huge wave of publicity to the cause, but ultimately it just wasn't enough — as ambivalent as many of us might be about Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg's social network just kept growing and growing (it now boasts some 1.49 billion users).

So what went wrong? Google already had hundreds of millions of users across its various apps and services, users who were prepared to at least try out Google+ if they saw a prompt in their Gmail inbox or on the Google search page. Ultimately though, Google wasn't focused on those users enough — it was concentrating on trying to outdo Facebook rather than giving people the alternative they really needed.

Google tried to force people to submit their real names on the network and sign up for an account in order to use YouTube. Many of these moves and other features introduced in Google+ simply alienated the people trying to find something good in it, and when you're trying to build up a community of users you can't afford to do that as often as Google did.

At the same time it didn't innovate enough. Google more or less cloned Facebook, but the real threats to Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire have come from the apps that do something different: WhatsApp (launched 2009), Instagram (launched 2010) and Snapchat (launched 2011). It's no coincidence that Facebook has bought the first two apps and tried to buy the third as well (before attempting to copy it instead).

We're not trying to build a large-scale social network at D4 but we think there are morals in the story for everyone. Even if you have the technical expertise, a big team, high level support for a project and a big marketing push, success is by no means guaranteed — software is built for people, and to that end you must understand the people you're building for. As a result, the most important part of the process is not the coding but the design and communication. Or, to put it another way, make something people want.