• Slate, Wednesday, November 9, 2011 12:18 PM

Slate is officially calling Google+ “dead.” Sure, some of have argued -- including Slate’s Farhad Manjoo -- that the network’s key feature -- the ability to divide friends into groups, or “Circles” -- isn’t all that great. And, analysis has consistently reported Google+’s traffic to be declining from its early peak. There also seems to be a growing consensus that there just isn’t much to do on Google+. All that, however, doesn’t represent what Manjoo calls Google+’s “central failure.”

Which is? As best we can tell, Manjoo is referring to a “launch-first, fix-it-later strategy,” combined with a resistance on Google’s part to let users make Google+ their own. Chiefly, Manjoo cites Google’s bizarre insistence on shutting down anything that resembled a branded profile -- until it was ready to officially launch a branded pages feature this week.

“Google couldn’t have possibly built every one of Facebook’s features into its new service when it launched, but to make up for its deficits, it ought to have let users experiment more freely with the site,” Manjoo writes. “That freewheeling attitude is precisely how Twitter -- the only other social network to successfully take on Facebook in the last few years -- got so big.”

Read the whole story at Slate »