There’s a version of the internet where Google Plus actually took off and honestly it’s kind of terrifying to think about. If you’re not familiar with it, Google Plus was Google’s attempt at building their own version of Facebook. They launched it, pushed it pretty hard for a year or two, and then quietly killed it when it became obvious that nobody wanted it. This was back around 2012 or 2013, so over a decade ago now, and most people have either forgotten about it or never knew it existed in the first place.
The whole thing was basically a nerd trying to be cool. Google tried to tie everything together, search history, YouTube, all of it, into one social platform. And that was kind of the first big problem. People very quickly realized they did not want their friends seeing what they were searching for. That’s a hard no for most people and Google probably should have figured that out before launch. Privacy concerns aside, it just never had the organic energy that Facebook had when it was growing. It felt forced and clunky and people just weren’t interested no matter how hard Google pushed it.
Here’s the thing though. If it had actually worked, the internet would look completely different right now. Meta probably wouldn’t exist as we know it. Google would have almost certainly bought out Facebook before it ever got big enough to be untouchable, and Mark Zuckerberg would have just become another acquisition rather than the guy running one of the most powerful companies on the planet. Whether that would have been better or worse is genuinely debatable. On one hand you’d get rid of Zuckerberg having that much individual power and influence. On the other hand you’d have Google owning everything from search to social to video to mobile, which is its own kind of nightmare scenario.
Facebook’s rise actually happened in a pretty gradual way that worked out kind of naturally. Millennials got on it first, built the culture, and then slowly their parents joined and that’s when it became a real money machine. Google Plus would have just forced everybody onto the same platform from day one with no organic growth period, which probably would have made it feel even more corporate and sterile than it already did.
Zuckerberg is a weird figure to have become this powerful and the internet has had a lot of fun with that over the years. There are entire compilations of him saying things that just don’t land the way a normal human would say them. Apparently at one point during a big press announcement there was just a random bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce sitting on the bookshelf behind him with absolutely no context. And more recently he’s been doing this whole rebrand where he’s trying to come across as relatable, riding jet skis, doing podcast appearances, talking about how he drinks coffee recreationally. Recreationally. Like it’s something you do on the weekends when you’re feeling adventurous.
Anyway the point is we got lucky that Google Plus failed. The version of the internet where it succeeded is probably alot worse than what we ended up with, even if what we ended up with is still pretty messy. Sometimes the flop is the best possible outcome.
