34 ms·
Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users
- jpulgarin 15y agoYes, but how many monthly actives?
- famousactress 15y agoExactly. I hate these misuses of the word 'Users'.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- progworker 15y agoThe number of users doesn't mean much, everyone is invited now.
- Hisoka 15y agoYep, # of users is meaningless. especially when curious people are clicking on that + image on top, and just pressing 1 button makes them automatically an user. That's like literally shoving random people into your store and calling them a shopper.
- mhb 15y agoUnless you're under 18. And the high school demographic seems like it would be pretty relevant.
- nl 15y agoThe fact that high-schoolers couldn't join Facebook for years didn't seem to hurt it too much. Edit: downvoted? To quote Wikipedia: The Web site's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site's terms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
- dcurtis 15y ago"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion." During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 15y agoBuy patents apparently :-) More seriously, I asked once about this when they were removing bottled water from the local mini-kitchens and dropping over 1 billion dollars a quarter into the bank. My question was "Gee, can't you spare a couple of million this quarter to keep the bottled water restocked?" and obviously the answer was that they could not. But from a corporate/strategic point of view having a lot of cash on hand makes executives more aggressive and that can be a good thing for the company. Just like employee's that are too afraid to lose their job to say what they really need to say, executives who are too afraid that their next decision could doom the company won't take those risks. Like anything there is a balance.
- jayzee 15y agoGlad that they took away the bottled water. It is still H20 from the water fountain.
- haberdasher 15y agoRemoving bottled water is not a financial decision, but an environmental one. Every new employee is given a water bottle they can fill with water an infinite number of times. If they took away bottled water, I'm sure they replaced them with fruit juice, organic teas and all sorts of ambrosia.
- babycakes 15y agoSo, they replaced the plastic bottle of water with a plastic bottle of flavored water-like beverage. Sounds like an environmental win to me.
- tomahhy 15y agoAnd how many of those accounts are spammers getting in early to build rep and appear legitimate?
- deltaqueue 15y agoJust a datapoint, but out of all the invitations I sent out when G+ first launched (100-150, I don't recall), 40 or 50 friends signed up. ~3 of them still use it at least once a week. From my observations, G+ still seems to consist primarily of three major user groups: 1. Tech celebrities 2. Technologists in general 3. Non-US users Facebook's feature set is killer, but at some point, I really would like to use some social software that doesn't silently launch a blinking GPS signal when I'm reading my news feed (I know, I can disable it, but still...).
- manojlds 15y agoYou forgot professional photographers...
- robotchampion 15y agoYup and also remember that Facebook beat MySpace because of the techie users. It's not the masses that determine success its the influencers.
- gms 15y agoWere you around when Facebook came out? Its early users were not tech types.
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoIn my case, 0% of my friends went to G+ initially. Now they're slowly trickling in.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jonknee 15y agoHow do you know if they are using it? Maybe you're not in often used circles of a lot of the people you invited.
- Steko 15y agoSomething like 20 million of their users are in India, a lot of those look like Orkut (Google) converts (edit: maybe notsomuch, add FB and look at last few years). http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=google%20plus%2Corkut&geo=IN&date=6%2F2011%205m&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=google%20plus%2Cork...
- rwolf 15y agoOrkut appears to decline steadily on that graph since 2007. Any variable which goes up over time would look like it was stealing mindshare from orkut. Negative correlation is also not causation.
- manojlds 15y agoSearch doesn't correlate to usage. I don't search for Facebook, but use it a lot.
- lukesandberg 15y agoa lot of people search for facebook. search is just faster than navigating or bookmarks a lot of the time.
- jlees 15y agoI was in India recently; there is a huge amount of love for Google there, so it doesn't surprise me.
- aprescott 15y agoI know I need to just be patient and wait for Apps users to get Profiles/Plus, but I don't find it particularly sympathetic of Google when they keep saying that "everyone" can use Google+ now, even in their financial results announcements. From the CEO. (Yes, technically anyone can use it by signing up with a free @gmail.com account, but I consider that a cop out.)
- joebadmo 15y agoAfter reading Steve Yegge's "platforms" rant, I'm starting to see examples of it everywhere in Google products. This seems like a prime example.
- tomkarlo 15y agoYou don't need to use a gmail account. You just need to create a Google login that isn't an Apps login. You can use the same domain as your apps account - I use that, just with a slightly different username for Google+
- aprescott 15y agoWhile this is true, it's in the same class of work-around as just registering a @gmail.com account. It doesn't let an Apps user use their Apps account in a unified way, which is what I was getting at.
- sundar22in 15y agoI don't think Google+ will ever be a Facebook killer (Is Bing a Google killer?). Google's strengths are search and advertising, but not social networking. Given that Google+ is integrated to many google products, its not going to die soon IMHO, but it will be just there for sometime (Yahoo/excite never closed after google success). Contrary example is gmail which caused a dent in Yahoo mail and still gaining momentum. But gmail was re-inventing email access (gtalk integration), but Google+ is no way close to revolutionizing social networking.
- tko 15y agothat is a huge gain....but how many of the 40 million users are still using Google+???
- zmmmmm 15y agoAn interesting meta data point here is that out of the short few sentences they chose to quote from larry page, more than 50% of it was about Google+. Even though it generates no revenue and has a tiny user base compared to the rest of Google's products. Which is to say, whatever you think about Google+ it is undeniable that they see it as a huge strategic priority.
- aswanson 15y agoTheir naming /branding scheme is not good. Google + sounds like an API extension or a bad programming language. Sometimes it's better to give a product a human face...beginning with a name that communicates what it is.
- lallysingh 15y ago.. only if you're a programmer, most of whom would probably know what Google+ really is.
- suivix 15y agoI think it's an odd name because it contains a non-alphanumeric character. I can't think of a better one though, so I can't make fun of it.
- smackfu 15y agoFor comparison, Facebook has 800 million users and hit 500 million active users in a single day.
- nextparadigms 15y agoFor comparison Facebook is 7 years old and Google+ is 3 months old.
- gms 15y agoHow do they define 'user', for Google+? Facebook's metric is 'active users' which I believe are people who have visited the site during the past 30 days. If Google+'s definition of 'user' is simply someone who has registered for a Google+ profile, then they are overcounting enormously. My feeling is that they are indeed disingenuously overcounting, in the same way they do with Android, where they talk about the number of 'activations' rather than device sales.
- lukesandberg 15y agoIn the case of android, Google doesn't even have relationships with every carrier that sells android phones so 'activations' are the only metric that would actually cover everything. why do you think that they are not using a 30-day active definition of user?
- gms 15y agoBecause I know a lot of people who use Facebook, and next to none of those use Google+ (even though many registered in the beginning). This is the same for many people I know. So I'm taking a guess. As far as I can tell the only people using Google+ are tech people.
- dazbradbury 15y agoScanning through the comments here, in the media, and lots of tech blogs, google+ is taking a bit of a battering. Everyone seems to be hating on it. Sure, it's quite likely it will never "beat" facebook, but what happened to: http://xkcd.com/918/ http://xkcd.com/918/ I'm still very happy there is an alternative. I don't care if people think two social networks is one too many. Competition is good. Facebook = { All the people I know (pretty much) } Google+ = { All the people I care about what they have to say } I think google+ will always have a place, regardless of whether it crushes fbook in terms of active users or not.
- watty 15y agoI agree, I rarely go on facebook anymore. Picasa + Google+ blows facebook out of the water... except it lacks users :)
- paganel 15y agoA social network that is great but which lacks users... it reminds me of Radio Yerevan jokes :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Yerevan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Yerevan)
- mhb 15y agoIsn't it pretty significant that most high schoolers (under 18) can't even sign up yet?
- hunterp 15y agoWhy is there 0 mention of Android in this report???
- rymedia 15y agoGuess it's time I get a google+ account.