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I think the forced sign up and stuff really hindered it a lot. To have people use your product, they have to decide to use your product. That's why so many of us who joined early, before it was open to the public, loved and used it. My feed was a pretty massive stream of new information - friends, people I had met online, bloggers, etc. It was really nice actually. When they opened it up (quite quickly actually), and started forcing real names, forcing users to create accounts when they signed into gmail, starting fucking with youtube accounts, started having people in my contacts show up as potentials to add to my circles EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD NEVER USED G+, that's when it officially died.