There's such a thing as too minimalist. People like pretty, flashy things. Google was taking minimalism too far for a while. One of the reasons I think Google+ never really took off is that it wasn't pretty enough.
Discussion
I think Google plus failed because it had crappy UI and UX. I remember playing with it and thinking “very Google of them “ and not in a good way. The Google integration made everything forced and worse. It became impossible to use other services without struggle. Minimalism had nothing to do with it imo.