With the news that Vic Gundrota, the head of Google+, is stepping down, here is a damning account of Google+ by someone who worked on it.

Danny Crichton, for Techcrunch:

“Now, for the first time, I got to look upon the future of the world’s most recognizable Internet company and, perhaps, the future of social as well.

The product, internally known as Emerald Sea, was just two weeks from launch, and a digital counter near my desk was ticking down the days to June 28, 2011. I had just gotten my Google-issued laptop, so I opened up my web browser, and navigated to the internal version of the product, and …. stared. Just stared. It’s hard to exactly describe the state of the product at that point, but it was reminiscent of Facebook, albeit with a cleaner profile page and more whitespace.

After about 10 minutes of using it, I got distracted and left to find some food. I never reopened the product that day, an ominous sign in retrospect. Later, I hung out with some of the other new graduates who had just joined the team, and there was an awkward silence that can only come when the emperor walks by without his clothes on. No one could figure out why anyone would use this. As we would learn soon, we weren’t the only ones.”