Many look to Twitter as their new social media platform, that together with IG (which is owned by facebook sure, but it's "harder" to be political there, which it all comes down to in the end) and Snapchat as a messenger.
Google plus failed, so why wouldn't Facebook eventually do so also? The youth don't have Facebook, it's mostly the 20-40 year olds who do. This 20-40 generation follow the mainstream media news and most of them are capable of realizing the harm in not protecting ones own privacy. Also, the current theme of news regarding social media is that it's being seen as a threat to democracy due to the ease of massive manipulation through political propaganda. A huge attack! Threaten democracy and the people will hate it.
The reverse network effect is also real. People who leave for whatever reason reduce the value of the service to others. Services quickly goes from the first place to keep in contact to yet another place to post event announcements and not much else.
If Google+ were launching today, they might have a better chance. More people are interested in Facebook alternatives. At the time, Facebook had already supplanted MySpace and Google+ didn't offer anything attractive enough to switch again.
No point swapping Facebook for another advertising-driven social network in the same vein. If a company like Apple were running it and people were paying for it, that would be a different matter.
Google have contributed to privacy issues, e.g. with poor permission management.
I'd say the big difference with google is they can treat a social network as a loss leader. Google has other (far more profitable) forms of privacy invading revenue sources, facebook doesn't.
It's not a ideal solution however. If as a society we have decided social networks are important a not for profit, or decentralised federated scheme is probably the way to go.
Running a social website should be cheap enough that they don't need to be invasive. The company would be leaving money on the table as it where, but winning is worth enough that it's a good trade-off.
"If a company like Apple were running it and people were paying for it, that would be a different matter."
Oooh if only Apple did "social" apps well; they are famously not-so-great at doing them, I'm not sure where that comes from at root though.
Shooting from the hip: Maybe their intense internal secrecy translates into a worldview where the hyper-focus on the 1:1 relationship with their customer obscures their ability to see how their customers (and potential non-customers!) could interact; might even be dangerous.
Google could not be more confusing. I spend 10 hours a day on the computer, and I will avoid Google stuff because it’s just not worth the time it takes to educate yourself about their nonsense, so I wouldn’t expect anyone less tech savvy to want to bother with them either.
The main problem with Google is that I expect any service they build (beyond their biggest ones) to be shutdown eventually (probably sooner rather than later). It's not worth taking a chance on them anymore.
Except instas sponsored ads are more pernicious (from a mobile ux pov) than fbs including the fact that fb still tracks you on every site. All credit to the Zucc for buying insta and whatsapp since the entire world (especially on whatsapp) are locked in that ecosystem.
Google plus failed, so why wouldn't Facebook eventually do so also? The youth don't have Facebook, it's mostly the 20-40 year olds who do. This 20-40 generation follow the mainstream media news and most of them are capable of realizing the harm in not protecting ones own privacy. Also, the current theme of news regarding social media is that it's being seen as a threat to democracy due to the ease of massive manipulation through political propaganda. A huge attack! Threaten democracy and the people will hate it.