It never went anywhere because it's an engineer's solution to a social problem.

IG and others have similar functionality nowadays at least.

Excellent point. Plus and Wave were ahead of their time.

Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.

> Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it.

Then it wasn't a good feature.

The point is that we weren't looking for social media, so killer SNS features didn't matter. It was a better mousetrap for a market that's deep down motivated by mashed potatoes.