Comment Re:We want something new but the same. (Score 4, Insightful) 519
> Until everyone is on Google, nobody's going to Google
No, masses are irrelevant for success, G+ had to win those "leader" type of people who helped FB win, the high-influence college crowd, the trendsetters, the queen bees who basically get to decide what will used, the rest will simply have to passively follow like worker bees. FB was wildly successful long before everybodys aunt and grandma joined, because frankly, nobody cares about them. FB had the important (private) college crowd and thats all they wanted. The aunts and grandmas simply followed.
G+ made the fatal flaw in their strategy not to identify what made FB successful in the first place, getting high-value people on board first. They thought that an G+ account itself had enough worth to play the "invite only" gamble, but this was so wrong. The worth of an social netwrk account is not measured by features of the account itself, but by "which indispensable people are exclusively on there". Nobody indispensable was exclusively on G+, so G+ had no power to force the masses to abandon FB in order to not be cut off from their influential peers on G+.
Then Google made the next fatal flaw to massively fuck off early adopters, who _did_ bother to go where nobody has gone before and to make an account. The early adopters were people who were fed up with FB's privacy breaches and looked for a more moderate alternative. They were not just amazed b G+ features, they looked for a second, less intrusive home. And what did Google do to those terraformers, who were supposed to turn into evangelists and make G+ attractive to non-members? Google started threatening and deleting their accounts, forcing "real names", talking about an perverse "identity service" under which no anonymous thought will be allowed to be expressed. The attack against enthusiastic early adopters gave everybody a sense of things to come, that Google+ will not be better than FB in any imaginable way privacy wise, that their ego is already inflated so long before they have a large enough user base to justify it. There will be no second wave of early adopters, the news has already been spread that the new master is as ruthless and abusive as the current master, so theres no point in relocating.
By Googles own actions, it became clear that FB just isnt that bad as everybody thought before G+.