Google+ may have failed but the intent and mission behind it didn't.

Google+ was Google's attempt to take on Facebook with its own social product. It definitely failed, and the intent and mission failed too. That isn't to say that they have no social data, but they definitely don't have access to the full social graph that Meta does.

It wasn't a complete failure. Before Google+ Google's various products were all siloed. Your data in gmail was in a different silo from you data from search, which was different from your data from Google Reader, etc. As part of the Google+ push, Google put out an EULA that basically said that it could share data from any google product you used with any other google product you used and it was one big unified account now. Thanks to that, they're able to target their ads based on much more data. But, they still wish they'd been able to get a Facebook competitor up and running so they could see more clearly who your friends and family were. There's so much interpersonal data they're missing out on.