Google was at its best a relatively open culture and 2011 is the year they killed other cultural icons such as Google Labs and (unofficially) deprecated 20% time. I think the road to the Google we see today started then. It's also the year they paid too much for Motorola and started pushing Marissa Mayer out the door.
Something about this rings true.
it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.
From my POV, the Google+ launch was doomed by the way it was foisted on Google users. Because of that, my feelings of cynicism towards the product started in less than a second.
I hated Google plus for how open they forced everyone on it to be. VS Facebook was private in its beginning.
I hated Google plus because they forced all of their services to begin to rely on it. They forced various logins to use it.
I have stopped using play store comments and YouTube for this very reason.
Had they split Google plus into parts where people adopted it slowly they would have fared better. Parts like friend network-1, forum network-2, news network-3, share page-4, posts page-5, etc.
I still remember when they replaced Facebook and Twitter search results with GOOGLE plus results.
And the bonuses part is why this makes so much sense about why they did it.
Tahrir Square in 2011 was the high water mark for a lot of tech. It was the time when we all thought that SV really really was going to change the world for the better this time, no for real reals.
After the Arab spring turned into winter, a lot of the air went out of the tech balloon. It never was really the same. Cynicism crept in along with the MBAs and the Generals.
Something about this rings true.
it was really disappointing to see a potential Facebook killer die of a thousand papercuts like this.
From my POV, the Google+ launch was doomed by the way it was foisted on Google users. Because of that, my feelings of cynicism towards the product started in less than a second.