Former Googler launched 5-day tweetstorm to share Google+ experience

Nicholas Carlson

• A former Google web designer described his experiences while working briefly at Google+, the company’s recently shuttered social network.
• Morgan Knutson, who worked at Google for eight months before resigning in May 2012 described a lack of vision for the service, wasted resources and details how Vic Gundotra, the overall leader of Google+, wielded his massive power within the company. 
• Knutson’s narrative, written like a Twitter serial, sheds light on the troubled Google+, one of the company’s most noteworthy and expensive failures.

If you’re interested in technology, then one of the most fascinating longer reads available about Silicon Valley culture is the Twitter serial posted last week by Morgan Knutson, a former Google+ web designer.

Morgan wrote more than 200 tweets over a period of five days about his brief tenure at Google+, the long troubled and now-defunct social network.

Knutson began writing a day after it was revealed in The Wall Street Journal that Google had not disclosed for seven months that a security lapse had enabled third-party developers to see private information belonging to as many as 500,000 Google+ users.

A few hours after the story was published, Google announced it had shuttered Google+, which was created to challenge Facebook but never came close.

Apparently, the situation prompted Knutson to reveal information he had bottled up for six years.

Part of what makes Knutson’s tweets so fascinating is that a former Googler has anything bad to say about the company.  The company has a reputation for being one of the most employee-friendly places in tech, chock full of perks and benefits. It’s rare that a former staffer complains publicly. 

The other reason Knutson’s story is so compelling is due to the titillating details about the disfunction that reigned at the Google+ of 2012.   

Morgan, who resigned in 2012 after lasting only eight months at Google before leaving and taking a job at Dropbox, describes a service that lacks an overall vision, often wastes resources and is propelled and shielded internally by Vic Gundotra, the powerful former Google exec who led the Google+ effort. 

He also said, contrary to his prior beliefs or the image that Google sells, not every employee is at the top of their field. 

But it’s important to remember, and as Knutson acknowledges, he was one employee working on one project during a brief period.

To say that Knutson sounds disgruntled is an understatement. To his credit, he admits that he chaffed at receiving criticism and disliked it when he believed he didn’t get enough credit.

He also had good things to say about some of his managers and about most of the people he came in contact with at Google.

Lastly, with all of Google’s success and money and the sheer size (more than 80,000 employees now), it’s easy to think of the company as something other worldly.

What Knutson does — with his descriptions of bruised egos, turf wars and politically minded bosses — is remind us that Google isn’t all that different from anywhere else where humans are employed.