Google should have easily won The Social Network War not only did Google have more money experience employees and users Google actually launched their first social network site in January 2004 a few weeks before Facebook launched and long before the likes of Twitter and Instagram in fact Google has created many different attempts to directly compete with all of these platforms and yet they've all failed most famous was Google Plus which has since been described as Google's biggest ever failure it became a joke and not only did people not want to use it many actively hated it
nobody lacks Google Plus but if you go to a Google Search and just type in Google Plus is you get a lot of negative suggested search results nobody likes Google Plus nobody uses it it's like a synonym for a failed social network so what was the real reason Google plus failed with the help of leaked emails and interviews in this video we'll explore behind the scenes of the rise and fall of Google Plus because Google is a a company that has achieved such ridiculously impressive things from organizing the internet with search to indexing the world's
books mapping the planet and creating countless Innovative and helpful products and yet when it comes to building a social network to rival Facebook Google has repeatedly failed spectacularly now technically you could say YouTube is a social network but it's obviously more of a video platform than friends connecting and sharing updates which is why Google spent so much money trying to make Google Plus work so let's go on a journey into the inner workings of Google and find out the truth foreign [Music] many people think Google was late to see the potential of social media but
that is definitely not the case long before we had Facebook Twitter and Instagram or even before early social networks like bibo and Myspace there was a website called friendster.com one of the first social networking sites that allowed you to connect with friends and share posts and images in fact it was actually Friendster that inspired Myspace but what most people don't know is that within just one year of friends they're going live Google tried to buy friends there they offered 30 million dollars worth of Google stock for the site which was a huge offer for a
relatively new website however Friendster turned it down at the time there was a lot of hype around new internet companies and the friends the founder had advisors telling him this could be a multi-billion dollar business so he rejected Google's offer to buy friends there in hindsight this was clearly a disastrous decision Friendster ultimately failed and went out of business and those Google Shares he would have received would today have been worth over a billion dollars but the rejection was bad for Google too as it meant since they could couldn't buy Friendster they had to start
their own social network site from scratch instead and that's exactly what they did Orchid was the first social networking service owned and operated by Google the website was named after its creator a Google employee called Orca and I'm not even going to attempt to correctly pronounce his surname but he was a Turkish software engineer who developed this social site as an independent project while working at Google as Google encouraged all its employees to spend some of their work time on their own side projects orkit was designed to help users connect with both new and old
friends and it had many of the features we associate with social networks today like creating your own posts updating your status sharing photos and liking and commenting on what your friends shared too what's interesting is Orchid had a small head start on Facebook as it launched in January 2004 literally just a couple of weeks before Zuckerberg launched Facebook in February 2004. although back then it was called the Facebook whilst Orchid did reasonably well its popularity mostly came in India and Brazil in fact in 2008 Google announced okay would be fully managed and operated in Brazil
since that's where most of its users were elsewhere orchid's popularity took a big hit after a serious security breach where passwords and banking info was leaked and many lost trust in the site another issue was that Orchid had a relatively small team assigned to it and so it often lagged behind in terms of new features and they struggled to properly moderate this eye there were reports of lots of spam and abuse on the platform and so when you combine all of this with the fact that other social media sites began popping up like Myspace and
Facebook that users seem to prefer orkit was eventually shut down completely if you visit the website now you'll simply see a letter written by the original founder of the site Orca himself one particularly interesting line is that he says our online tools should serve us not divide us they should protect our data not sell it they should give us hope not fear and anxiety and that's clearly a sentiment shed by many that social media ended up taking a much darker path than people originally hoped but still for Google after Orchid didn't work out they went
right back to the drawing board and very quickly launched another social network attempt Google friend connect was launched in 2008 and allowed any website owner to turn their own page into a social platform you could log in with your Google account and see which of your friends were using that same site and share comments on the website but once again this failed so in 2009 they launched Google wave and this time articles popped up saying Google wave could threaten Facebook and Twitter with analysts saying wave was possibly the most comprehensive entrant into the social networking
business it was described as combining features of email instant messaging blogging wikis multimedia management and document sharing whilst offering a variety of social networking features too and if that sounds a little confusing that's because it was users found it complicated to use and it never took off but Google was clearly adamant they wanted a social network so in 2010 they launched a new project called Google buzz and this time Google had the idea to integrate this new service with gmail which made sense in theory as they could then capitalize on the massive user base they
are already had rather than starting from zero users the problem was this implementation was horrible Gmail users were surprised to find one day that they were now part of Google Buzz even though they hadn't signed up for it and suddenly their email contact list and some other Gmail data had been made public for example their most frequent email contacts were added as friends on Google buzz and anyone who shared emails with was added as one of your followers which for many was awkward as they may not want certain areas of their lives to overlap like
this this not only resulted in many angry users but also a class action lawsuit which Google ultimately settled for millions of dollars later in 2010 so basically while the integration with Gmail was supposed to give Google Buzz a massive boost it backfired completely and ended up making the whole Google Buzz service very short-lived it was eventually pulled completely after privacy concerns and controversy around a weak security once again Google had failed with social networking so after failing to buy friends there then launching and failing four separate social products or get friend connect wave and as
it was time for a new strategy it was time for Google's biggest social network project of all in 2010 Google was growing increasingly concerned about Facebook Facebook was consuming more and more of users Time online and the average minutes per visitor was increasing faster for Facebook than Google not just that but Facebook's ad model had potential to really hurt Google's ad business in many ways Facebook had created the best ad machine possible users voluntarily told Facebook exactly who they were what they liked and what their interests were and thus for advertisers they were willing to
pay a lot of money because with Google ads you could reach people who are already actively searching for something but with Facebook you could advertise to exactly your ideal customer and introduce them to things they didn't even know they wanted yet and as if this wasn't worrying enough for Google Facebook was growing so fast that they were poaching quite a lot of Google's top employees from them so the fear of Facebook moved Google into action it was time to take social networking much more seriously and it was really a man named Vic gundotra who was
the driving force behind Google plus he joined Google in 2007 as vice president of Social and he very quickly became concerned by the growing influence of Facebook and how much power it could harness from all the personal data it was collecting around this point Larry Page one of the original co-founders of Google had returned to CEO and Vic was constantly telling Larry about how serious the threat of Facebook was eventually Larry agreed and put Vic in charge of a new project called Google Plus after multiple failures Google was determined to make Google Plus a success
unless it quickly became a very Central project at Google they allocated a huge amount of resources and employees from all other units at Google to work on this they poured lots of time and money into this as it was going to be one of their main focuses going forward just to illustrate this Larry Page sent a memo to the whole company where he told them 25 of their bonus would be tied to Google success in Social which basically meant if Google Plus did well their bonus could be 25 higher so the whole company had a
big Financial incentive to ensure Google Plus succeeded now for context Google's previous social attempts Google Buzz maybe had a dozen people working on whereas some estimates say Google Plus had over a thousand employees directly involved this time Google was serious and this project was supposed to be the Facebook killer and in 2010 Facebook was privately valued around 14 billion dollars whereas Google had a market cap of over 200 billion so Google certainly had the resources and user base to win and defeat Facebook so what happened foreign Google Plus officially launched in 2011 and at first
look it had potential Google Plus had many of the Hallmarks we associate with social networks today you could post updates share photos and comments and send direct messages in fact there were even group video chats called Hangouts but one of the most unique Parts about Google Plus was a core feature called circles which allowed users to group their contacts into specific categories and control what content they saw so for example you could have one Circle for family one for co-workers one for close friends one for casual acquaintances you met at an event years ago and
so on so when you post that drunk Club photo of yourself you could choose to just share it with your friend's Circle rather than literally everyone you've ever connected with you could even have a circle specifically for business contacts so you can can share your marketing post with them without spamming your friends and family who aren't interested and so this circle's concept seemed like a cool idea instead of just lumping everyone together equally as friends or followers like on other platforms another feature of Google Plus was Sparks where you could find content you're interested in
and then share with your circles Google Plus was also designed to integrate with other Google services including search and email basically Google wanted to unify everything so people would have one single identity across the whole web it would all be connected to Plus or as Marcus Brownlee put up Google plus is basically the hub for it so you're going to see Google Plus in like embank it in services like Google Calendar Google services like search and contacts and Gmail and that's all going to help tie everything together with your profile and everything about you on
your Google Plus profile now in order to create hype around the launch of Google Plus Google decided to roll it out gradually by using an invite program so to join Google Plus at first you had to be invited by someone else it was invite only and when you got invited you could could then send a few invites out to people yourself this invite program not only allowed Google to get feedback and fix bugs by Rolling it out gradually but it also allowed them to create a feeling of exclusivity and Buzz around Google Plus people wanted
an invite to check it out themselves and it's quite possible Google were aiming for something right out of the Facebook Playbook here as when Facebook first launched they only expanded to certain college campuses at a time to create a real feeling of exclusivity hype and demand and since many of the earliest people invited to Google Plus were people with big voices in the tech industry in Silicon Valley they definitely helped generate a lot of good publicity for the platform ironically though what are the earliest users of Google Plus was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who managed
to get an invite from someone he knew in the tech industry and it's reported that Facebook was getting so nervous about Google Plus that Zuckerberg implemented a company-wide lockdown at Facebook where he instructed all employees to drop anything else they were doing and dedicate their time to Bringing Facebook's features in line with their new rival Facebook was undoubtedly very worried about the competition and indeed once Google announced it was going to be using its vast power and resources to create a rival social networking platform many experts predicted Google Plus would succeed in beating Facebook and
becoming the king of social media Google Plus officially launched in 2011 and by the end of the year they had around 90 million users within a couple of years they'd reached a peak of over 500 million users with user numbers like that you may be wondering how was Google Plus Google's biggest ever failure well here's the thing these numbers were all a sham now if there's one thing this story shows us it's how quickly fortunes can be both made and lost when it comes to tech companies in fact last year tech companies lost 800 billion
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without needing Millions every single one of Masterworks is 11 exits to date has returned a profit to their investors with those kind of results offerings have sold out in under an hour as they have over 650 000 users already and there's normally a wait list to join but Masterworks is giving magnates media viewers special access right now to skip that wait list simply click the link in the description below now and you can get started today foreign positives for Google were in fact negatives firstly was Google's invite-only method of launching the site worked kinda well
at first to create Intrigue they seemed to wait too long before opening it to the masses Because by the time they did open Google Plus to everyone a lot of that initial hype and Intrigue had already died down and worst of all because Google Plus access was so limited at first the people who did get invites didn't necessarily have many contacts to speak with on the platform you knew the person who'd invited you and the few people you'd invited yourself with your limited amount of invites but unlike other social media where all your friends were
on it Google Plus's long invite-only system meant there weren't a lot of people you knew on the site and the key to any social media is the network effect where the platform becomes more valuable the more people that use it but with Google plus barely anyone you knew was actually on it or actively posting so Google Plus was already facing a big uphill battle as if all your friends are already in a different place that them were used to where's the incentive for you to switch to this new site that seemed to just offer a
similar thing but with less people and less posts and this was just the start of countless problems in July 2011 Google Plus began forcing users to identify themselves using their full real names and some accounts were suspended if they tried to use a private username instead the issue with this was that Google Plus connected to other Google services and many people didn't want their real name associated with everything they did the most notorious example of this was when Google made it compulsory for viewers on YouTube to make a Google Plus account if they wanted to
like or comment on any videos so people who'd been using YouTube for years were suddenly now forced into using a separate service they didn't want to use just to be able to continue commenting on YouTube it also meant you couldn't reply to pre-google plus integrated comments the YouTube Community very quickly turned against this the whole thing seemed like Google was trying to piggyback off the success of YouTube to help its failing social products but by doing so making YouTube worse the hate and backlash got so bad that even the YouTube co-founder updated the description of
the first ever YouTube video to say why the do I need a Google Plus account to comment on a video and I can't comment here anymore since I don't want a Google Plus account but for long many thousands of people were spamming the same comment all across YouTube with a tank and stick figure called Bob in order to protest a new commenting system and Google Plus is forced integration and it wasn't just YouTube instead of easily registering for a new Gmail account you are now supposed to join Google Plus first same for Android phone users
wanting to use the app store and even using services that seemingly had no real need for a social element like Google Maps and Google search you were aggressively pushed into joining Google Plus and part of the problem was that initially Google Plus was advertised as a standalone social network site in its own rights but then they changed that and announced it was a social layer that would work across everything so for example users could give any website they visited a plus one equivalent of a like button and so then if any of your Google Plus
contacts visited the same site they could see You'd given it a plus one but as some people began accidentally clicking this button and sharing with their entire higher Network every website they visited the feature didn't seem quite so good so basically whilst Google should have had a major advantage by being able to integrate their other services into Google Plus the integration felt too forced as by making it a requirement to have a Google Plus account in order to continue using existing Services just annoyed people and made them dislike Google Plus before even trying it and
so remember earlier when we said Google Plus announced lots of users and great user growth well now you can see the real reason why it wasn't that people were joining Google Plus because they wanted to use it they were being forced to join in order to continue using other services they did like such as YouTube it's kind of like when you get a new Windows computer you have to use Microsoft's browser in order to be able to download Google Chrome or Firefox but as for Google Plus itself the service was described by the New York
Times as being a ghost town almost nobody was really using it despite technically having over half a billion users at its peak in reality this was wildly inflated by users who had to join but weren't actually active the most hilariously damning statistic came from comscore who estimated that users spent an average of over seven and a half hours per month on Facebook but only three minutes per month on Google Plus and of course since most of Google Plus's so-called members didn't actually visit the site there wasn't much content to engage with so even if you
did give Google Plus a try it was pretty dead whilst Google didn't reveal this at the time they later admitted that 90 of users spent less than five seconds per session on Google Plus and over 90 of profiles were completely empty meaning they'd literally never posted anything now to be fair in response to the backlash Google did make changes they reversed the decision that you had to have your real legal name visible and they eventually removed some of the forced Integrations like the need for a Plus account to comment on YouTube but the problem is
the narrative that Google Plus sucks was already set they'd already been countless YouTube videos criticizing it there were even songs about it woke up this morning and check my Twitter went on Facebook and moaned about the weather and then I checked my friends updates on Google Plus we know it didn't because it sucks and so Google Plus was already tarnished from the start because of a bad initial experience people had and this it became fun to hate or mock many didn't even give it a chance because back then the narrative was Facebook was the cool
place all your friends were whereas Google Plus was just ruining other popular services and nobody really used it narratives are always over simplistic of course but they are powerful ironically right now the narrative has changed against Facebook as it's now that younger people don't care about Facebook Facebook has a bad record with user data and so on but back then even if Google Plus did have real potential most people had already made their minds up about it based on early bad impressions of course some people did give Google Plus a fair try and whilst a
minority liked it one of the biggest issues was that it didn't really offer much that was new or distinctive from other social platforms many critics argued it was too similar to Facebook and didn't offer anything truly unique it was almost like Google Plus focused more on defeating Facebook than providing a fresh and exciting social experience that people actually enjoyed and since most users at the time were already fine with Facebook they didn't want to switch to a new service they didn't understand as well and that didn't seem to have any clear advantages in other words
Google were trying to take down Facebook by offering something similar to Facebook when really if you want to displace a well-entrenched social network you need to offer something Innovative or significantly better not just your own version of the same thing the reason Facebook took down competitors originally was by offering something different and in present day as Facebook's popularity is falling it's not because someone's directly copied Facebook it's because service has found something more Innovative and fresh that people prefer the general consensus was Google Plus did a bit of everything but not much of anything it
didn't have a unique selling point or Niche that gave people a clear reason to keep going back Facebook was good for checking in on Friends Twitter was good for real-time updates on what was going on but what was Google Plus even the destination for now you could say Google Plus did do some things differently like with the circles feature where you could share different things with different groups of people but although that sounded good in theory it actually made the site feel even more empty because you may have contacts on Google Plus who were actually
posting stuff but you weren't seeing it as you weren't in the right Circle the posts were only being shown to a subset of their contacts like one of the ideas was you could create circles around a specific interest and add contact of yours who shared that same interest but this required a lot more setup and organization than most people wanted to do so it wasn't really used that much besides part of the Beauty with other social media sites is you share something with all your friends and audience and you're surprised to find people you never
thought might like that type of post actually did like maybe you post about a band you like and some random connection of yours you'd never have guessed is really into the same band whereas with circles you kinda had to be more aware of which of your contacts liked what so people ended up sharing stuff with a much smaller amount of people also another problem with circles was nobody knew who was in each circle except for the person who'd created it so for example people couldn't share back content with the rest of the circle whereas Facebook's
group functionality was actually a lot better for building a community and to make matters worse many users found Google Plus confusing and difficult to navigate the mobile version was harder to use than Facebook Instagram or Twitter and it just didn't seem as fun to use also another idea that seemed promising but actually wasn't was that Google Plus initially stopped Brands and businesses creating their own Google Plus accounts in order to ensure all the content was from Individual people instead again interesting idea but in reality it just meant way less content further adding to Google Plus's
Ghost Town reputation internally at Google given the huge amount of time money and staff put into Google Plus it even seems like some within the company resented it especially since some of the teams would have been forced to compromise their own service for example I doubt the team working on YouTube necessarily wanted to integrate Google Plus however since a huge amount of the employee annual bonus depended on whether Google Plus hit its user targets employees ended up pushing the service on people including friends and family instead of prioritizing user experience first meanwhile as the pressure
and negativity around Google Plus mounted Vic condotra who'd been leading the project grew more and more stressed often staying up all night to work on the platform and pushing the team to their limits but after a reported Rift between Vic and other senior Google members in 2014 Victor left the company essentially abandoning his own project and just to add insult to injury for Google remember how one of the very first people to sign up for Google Plus was Mark Zuckerberg well Zuckerberg ended up getting more followers on Google Plus than Google's own CEO at the
time Larry Page but perhaps the final nail in the coffin was when Google Plus faced a major security breach that exposed the personal data of over 50 million users the breach was caused by a bug in the platform's API that allowed third-party apps to access private user data without permission Google Plus were accused of initially trying to cover up the breach and so there was even more criticism when it was finally revealed what happened finally in October 2018 a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and parent company alphabet due to Google Plus account data
being exposed as a result of this bug ultimately there were clearly multiple different reasons Google Plus wasn't working out the fact Google Plus didn't launch until 2011 a full seven years after Facebook and five years after Twitter always meant it had an uphill battle and it was Google Plus did launch the same year as Snapchat snap offered something new sure mobile Focus self-destructing Media whereas Google Plus essentially tried to recreate social networks that already existed honestly Google Plus probably wasn't as bad as it's now remembered as but early mistakes meant the narrative and perception was
always against Google Plus and thus in October 2018 Google announced that plus would be permanently shut down for good after so much initial hype and the hundreds of millions of dollars Google spent building it went down in history as Google's biggest failure of course with hindsight it's easy to see the issues but researching this did lead me to some funny predictions people made at the time many experts genuinely thought Google Plus would Dominate and my favorite prediction was this comment from 10 years ago that in just two lines said Apple was on the decline and
the Google Plus will come through to dominate eventually just like Windows Phone however the story of Google's Social Network battle wasn't quite over just yet foreign by 2019 Google Plus was officially shut down to Consumers and anything you had on Google Plus was transferred to the relevant Standalone application like photos you had on Google Plus were moved to a standalone product called Google photos and in fact several features of Google Plus like the video hangouts have become separate Google services that have continued to be useful however following the closure of Google Plus former Google employee
Morgan nutson posted a brutal series of tweets saying now that Google Plus has been shuttered I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was I'm still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I'd be working on Chrome then putting me on this God forsaken piece of some day one according to nudson every team worked separately on their own part of the project and there was a major lack of unity or Grand Vision interestingly though shortly after Google Plus was shut down Google once again attempted to
launch a social network this time a service called shoelace which I'm willing to bet most people have never even heard of the idea with this was to go for a much more low-key approach and instead of trying to do everything all at once like they're done with plus shoelace would simply focus on connecting people to local things happening in their own City so maybe this would finally be Google's social network success spoiler alert it wasn't the pandemic made it very hard for a new Social app like this to take off at all and the service
survived less than a year headlines popped up like Google is shutting down shoelace the social app you've probably never heard of so this was yet another social failure for Google it's strange as it seems Google are Masters at creating utilities and tools and solving complex problems honestly Google products and services have adding massively positive effect on my life overall and I'm sure it's the same for many of you watching but with the exception of YouTube which they acquired the more social Community Driven apps always seem to have been their weakness and perhaps part of the
problem is simply Google's culture where their prevailing wisdom is to quickly kill projects that aren't working and start over and this works great with many things but not with social networks where every reboot you lose any existing Network effects and start from scratch all over again I also think Google focus on features like circles illustrates the way Google thinks about things their assumption was that Google Plus users would enjoy spending time organizing their information and setting up everything exactly how they wanted it and indeed many tech-minded people did actually prefer Google Plus and the additional
controller gave them but the general public didn't want to spend their time on that organizational setup stuff they just wanted the platform to work right away generally people prefer Simplicity just look at more recent breakout apps like Tick Tock you don't even have to search for anything it just learns what you like and shows it to you whereas Google Plus had much more of a learning curve for example another core feature of Google Plus was Sparks that required you to actively search for things you were interested in and do the work yourself again it gave
you more control it just wasn't what the average social network user wanted and so now we know how Google lost let's find out why Myspace lasts because Myspace was hugely popular and had a massive lead over Facebook but there was a key reason it all fell apart just click this video to find out what that was I'll see there cheers
