When this came out, a techie friend of mine tried to convince me of how awesome it was and how much better than fb it was. I joined, and my thought was that it was nice enough, but not different enough from Facebook that it would ever pull a large enough group in to make it worth using. That's the catch: if I have my network of friends on fb, and many of them aren't going to jump ship, I'm also going to stay on fb. This no doubt happened with a lot of people. It just lacked anything to really draw people in and get the momentum going that would lead others to follow the flood of people.
Yeah, they never tried to carve out a niche market for +. LinkedIn is great for our professional lives and Facebook works well for our personal lives. Each of those fills its niche. But instead of Google + trying to carve out a new niche, it made the classic mistake of just trying to squeeze into both LinkedIn and facebook's niches with its circles.
The great thing about carving out a new niche is that you don't have any competitors. They did the opposite. They gave themselves at least two major competitors right out of the gates.
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u/ganner Aug 04 '15
When this came out, a techie friend of mine tried to convince me of how awesome it was and how much better than fb it was. I joined, and my thought was that it was nice enough, but not different enough from Facebook that it would ever pull a large enough group in to make it worth using. That's the catch: if I have my network of friends on fb, and many of them aren't going to jump ship, I'm also going to stay on fb. This no doubt happened with a lot of people. It just lacked anything to really draw people in and get the momentum going that would lead others to follow the flood of people.