I was bullish about Google Plus, even if it did feel like a Facebook clone. Google had built out a ton of infrastructure and was pushing Plus out through its major products. This had to be big!

But by most accounts and third-party research, the service is growing its number of users but not their engagement. People are "on" Google Plus, but they are not really ON Google Plus. The infrastructure is there. The street signs are there. People own plots of land. But there's nobody actually visiting town. To make it obvious: Google Plus is the California City to Facebook's Los Angeles.

Google, of course, vehemently disputes that the social network is anemic. They say not to trust the methodology of the people who measure public posts. They tell you that more private sharing occurs than public sharing. They say that the service is growing by every metric that matters to Google.

For example, here's what a Google spokesperson told me about one third-party report:

"By only tracking engagement on public posts, this study is flawed and not an accurate representation of all the sharing and activity taking place on Google+. As we've said before, more sharing occurs privately to circles and individuals than publicly on Google+. The beauty of Google+ is that it allows you to share privately - you don't have to publicly share your thoughts, photos or videos with the world."

But it is simply impossible to ignore that few people actually *use* Google Plus in any way that we've come to define usage of a social network. ComScore says people spent about 3 minutes a month at the site. Google contends that doesn't include mobile traffic or the dropdown menu that appears when you click the red "notification" icon in Gmail and other Google services. But neither of those places seems likely to change the overall pattern here. Deep engagement is not lurking in that dropdown. Let's say actual G+ usage is 10x what the numbers say, so 30 minutes. Facebook's at 405. Pinterest's at 89. Tumblr is at 89, too.

Another small piece of evidence: I added up all the links from plus.url.google.com to The Atlantic. In total, we received 16,000 visitor referrals from the site. That ranks it in the low 30s for us and that sum is orders of magnitudes smaller than we get from some of Google Plus' competitors. BuzzFeed assembled some similar evidence on +1s from around the web along with a devastating excoriation of the site experience.

"Logging into Google+ feels like logging into a seminar, or stumbling into the wrong conference room at an airport Marriott," John Herrman wrote. "It looks like a cubicle farm and smells like a hospital."

Ouch. So what gives? How could Google have invested so much money and credibility in building a service that, by all accounts except Google's own, doesn't work?

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One hypothesis, advanced by TechCrunch's Josh Constine, is that we in the media completely misread Google Plus. The service was not an attempt to compete with Facebook. It was not a declaration of social war. No, it was a classic Google approach to social: develop a method to extract and organize information, but this time about the humans. So, they gave us something that looked like Facebook with familiar text boxes to fill in. They tricked us into inputting ourselves into their database with the promise of a great service. On this theory, it doesn't matter to Google if we use G+ because we already gave them our names, locations, interests, and webs of social connections.