9 ms·

Robert Scoble calls G+'s "ghost town" reputation "unfair ... simply wrong"

87 points by jeffool 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dgudkov 14y ago
I use G+ more frequently than FB and I enjoy better signal/noise ratio in my G+ streams. I suppose both FB and G+ miss interest-based approach which makes them still more noisy than they should be.
tferris 14y ago
Social bloggers as Scoble are generally useless but this time he raised an interesting point: Twitter is the ghost town not G+ and he brought some impressive figures proving that. I don't know if he's right, I reduced time in all networks but Twitter is slightly before G+: - FB 1-5 times/day - Instagram 1-5 times/week - LinkedIn 1-2 times/week - Twitter once per week (at max) - G+ never - Path never I think his large number of followers on G+ is a result of his very early engagement on G+ spamming the network around the clock. Moreover, the Twitter audience is not a perfect match for Scoble—his posts have a special style, verbose and opinionated and obviously don't appeal to the typical Twitter user (tech and Internet savvy who are often better informed than Scoble himself).
- DizzyDoo 14y ago
  I use Twitter in a very different way than Facebook though, and for very different reasons. I follow a small group of smart, funny or creative people that tweet really interesting stuff, but personally I tweet only a few times a month. Am I alone in that I don't use Twitter as a social networking tool, and more of a broadcasting-listening tool? To anyone looking at my twitter, it might seem extremely quiet and ghost-townish, but I am using Twitter much more than Facebook and getting more from it, albeit passively.
  - jeffool 14y ago
    Twitter is, for me, very much a "right now" tool. I used to read up on missed posts, but now I just follow too many people. So I look at the recent history of a couple of lists, then look at even less of my main stream for interesting conversations/links. FB/G+ feel far more involved, even if I'm doing the same thing. I chalk this up to the conversations being longer, and more in depth/nuanced.
  - brown9-2 14y ago
    I use it the same way as you do.
- Jd 14y ago
  For me the Twitter use case is to keep myself stimulated while working remotely by interactions with other people in my field, catch breaking news as it happens (e.g. blog articles on new tech), and to promote work that I have done (e.g. blog articles I have written). So when I am working actively on a project, I probably check 4-6 times a day. In between I probably check 2 times / week. I also have used monitoring tools like awe.sm to see how many people re-tweet things that I tweet out, among other things to make sure I'm providing value to people that are following me (i.e. high signal to noise ratio). I also use twitter to answer questions that I can't find the answers to elsewhere -- generally very technical questions. Facebook is a tricky one, since it promotes addictive "stalking" behavior. I've attempted to use it primarily for messaging and to hide most people who aren't in my immediate vicinity, thinking that I probably don't need to know what they are doing. Still, I am a part of "liking" tribes where there is an implicit economy of trading likes on something and receiving likes back. G+ I only use when I get annoying messages from Google that someone has asked me a question or added me to some circle. Other than that I avoid it like the plague -- this despite being an enthusiastic adopter in the early days. LinkedIn I use probably once a month, except in the occasional moments where I am actively networking. I get very little value here since I am not usually looking for work and the technical folks I interact with are available on Twitter (or, at worse, email).
- minikomi 14y ago
  Twitter was amazing just after the big quake hit here in Japan. Facebook also proved useful, but the cell networks were simply not able to handle the traffic and all my friends switched to twitter to communicate.
Iv 14y ago
G+ has far less updates that facebook on my account, and that's a feature ! People there don't post they have been wasted yesterday or they ate a mayonnaise sandwich. They share relevant news. I don't check facebook much anymore...
jeffool 14y ago
I've long sworn off Facebook, and have always been rather active on Twitter. I just hope G+ gets a good, functional mobile layout. I'm not sure how I feel about the current one yet. Everyone I know is on Facebook, and nearly everyone is on Twitter (with more joining just this week.) I have a large group of friends from a web community that all joined G+ at the same time, so, it's a completely valid social network for me, without having to do any work of reorganizing friends from high school who add me. Basically, for me it's a second chance at adding people on a social network, and this time, with easier tools, I'm getting it right.
- Drbble 14y ago
  Did you see the new iOS and Android versions that launched last week?
  - jeffool 14y ago
    I did, thanks! That's the one I'm not sure if I like. The previous one mundane, but functional. The new one trades in the conversational flow for ease of interaction (+1-ing, sharing, more options from the stream.) It's an interesting take, and I'm curious how I'll like it, but I haven't decided yet.
angryasian 14y ago
for everyone that says g+ is a ghost town, you must not be finding people to follow. The entire point is circles. I'm on g+ everyday, and even has become my bookmark and evernote replacement, ill post to myself.
- kinleyd 14y ago
  This is often the problem. Unless you are some kind of star in your own right, the odds are that almost nobody beyond random followers are going to include you in their circles. That basically leaves you with the option of circling others in order to have anything meaningful in your stream. Here again you are more or less guaranteed (in current conditions) that next to none of your friends/family is going to be on G+. So you are left with the option of circling strangers only, which is not what you would normally do on a social network. The great thing about G+ is that in this large group of strangers there is a huge number of tech (and other) luminaries who are actively engaging on the network. Circle them and you basically get a stream of comments, thoughts, links and pictures that are really worth following. I've only circled about a 100 or so of these "strangers" and I've just loving the interaction. Sure, nobody (or very few) +1 anything I have to say, but that doesn't bother me as I'm far more interested in what they have to say. No way you can call it a ghost town when you engage in G+ this way. On the other hand, if you circle nobody then it does become a ghost town. But it would hardly be fair to call it one.
  - fpgeek 14y ago
    I wonder if that's part of the point. On other social networks you're connecting with friends and family. On G+ you're circling strangers whose thoughts you're interested in. I think I'd prefer to mine the latter if my goal was to make better search results for you.
    - technoslut 14y ago
      The problem is that G+ seems to only get the people who are technology driven. Even then it's a fraction of that community. The 'average Joe' doesn't have any use for this. They can follow their friends on Facebook or follow their favorite celebrities on Twitter.
Swizec 14y ago
I don't use G+ for anything other than spamming links to my blog. Interestingly enough I have almost 2k "followers" despite never engaging with anyone beyond the comments on my blogs. Twitter, on the other hand, I spend my whole days there. It doesn't get as many clickthroughs to my blog, but it's magnificent for chatting with people and keeping in touch with interesting people I would like to get to know (rather than those I already know). As for FB ... there is still nothing better for organizing group events between scatterbrained friends.
- udp 14y ago
  > Interestingly enough I have almost 2k "followers" despite never engaging with anyone beyond the comments on my blogs. Are you part of the HN circle, by any chance?
  - Swizec 14y ago
    Uhm ... I might be, how do I check?
    - udp 14y ago
      Looks like you're in part 2: https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts The circles were generated from a list at http://hngp.axxim.net/ http://hngp.axxim.net/, but that seems to be offline now.
lmm 14y ago
My G+ account really is a ghost town. I would close it if I could figure out how to without killing my gmail etc. My twitter account /looks/ like a ghost town, in that I never do anything on it myself. But I'm using it to follow a bunch of feeds I'm interested in; I check it regularly. I'm not sure how an outside observer could tell the difference between the two, other than by counting logins - but for me, twitter is useful, and G+ is dead.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  You can close your Google Plus account in settings. I did it a few months ago. I later reactivated it and it restored my account with all my followers (it had removed all my old posts and profile information though). In settings it will warn you exactly what Google services will be affected by closing your G+ account.
Steko 14y ago
Pretty much every "G+ is a ghost town" thread I've read includes the caveat "unless you're Robert Scoble". Hilariously applicable at this moment.
- vibrunazo 14y ago
  Or a photographer, apparently their community is huge there: https://plus.google.com/u/0/109572812341174932454/posts/5D2ymHLVkXE https://plus.google.com/u/0/109572812341174932454/posts/5D2y...
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    Funny Orphans of Flickr now go to Picasa and 500px (the G+ photo album imports from Picasa Web IIRC) G+ are definitely an improvement over Picasa but it still doesn't feel right
  - rjsamson 14y ago
    Yeah, G+ had a really great, vibrant photography community. People like Trey Ratcliff have really done an amazing job getting people engaged there.
NZ_Matt 14y ago
The people that I see on Google+ use it in a very different way than the average user uses Facebook. It's much closer aligned to Twitter than Facebook. The average Facebook user uses it as a tool to keep in touch with family and friends. Google+ is a ghost town for most new users, a few of my non techie friends joined Google+ when it first launched and haven't been back since because their friends are still using Facebook. Scoble and most Google+ users are outliers. The majority of users want a social network to share with their friends and they are not interested in following a bunch of random people.
stephenhandley 14y ago
G+ is more about building an interest graph than FB, don't use it as a vanity/foodiate platform and it won't be a ghosttown. I'm mostly on it for link following and I'm getting super high quality science and tech links in my feed. the ghost-town characterization is way off base.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  Completely agree, only problem is that your interest feed relies on the people you subscribe to keep their posts related to the interest you associated them with. But if the scientists in your NASA circle want to post vacation pictures, you can't filter that out. You can try and get yourself included into their "Space News Only" circle, which would solve the problem, but badgering people who don't know you to do something for you, even little like this, isn't an optimal solution.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
I like G+ but it is a ghost town. If you follow enough people you will get good content but interaction is terrible. In the first few weeks I built up over 1500 'followers'. If I posed a question I would get responses. Now, nothing. If I ask a question I may get, at most, one response a few days later. Compare this with twitter where I have under 300 followers and get several responses instantly. I also find that to regularly get new content on G+ I have to follow lots more people than I do on Twitter. People seem to post a lot less frequently on G+ (a lot of people only post a few times a week). This is a problem for me because unlike Scoble I don't want to manage circles with tens of thousands of people. Eventually that will get unmanageable and unlike Scoble management of my social media accounts isn't part of my job.
- saraid216 14y ago
  I find I get much, much better engagement if I spend time in someone else's comments. As for circle management, I've never had an issue with that. I follow 2k people and I just wait for someone to get annoying before I uncircle them. If they're never annoying, don't post, or whatever, then I don't notice and it's no skin off my back. I just circle people with interesting streams and just watch it come in. I haven't adjusted my circles since August or so when I made one to share to.
gautamc 14y ago
For me FB is the proverbial ghost town - because I am no longer interested in the contents of activity feed I get on FB :-p . I am sure my opinions don't matter much, after all, I don't have thousands of friends on either of the two services. But for whatever its worth, I've started to really like G+ since I've started to follow Linus Torvalds and Stephen Kinsella on G+. I like the drag-drop UI that "Circles" tab/widget implements and I love the posts that Linus shares with the public. I don't know if Linus has/uses FB too, but I don't care. I think that if Google runs G+ long enough and has cool & intelligent people using/developing it, G+ will not do too bad.
robryan 14y ago
Have they made it easier to follow say someones tech updates only. I remember early on there was the issue that circles didn't work when you were circling someone but they weren't circling you, so you would get their public updates, but that lost the ability to segregate to what people are interested in.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
Off-topic: I don't use G+ (or Facebook, for that matter), but I've always wondered what's with its disgusting, un-humanish urls. It's Scobble's (I presume): https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853 https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853 What the hell is that? If you wanted to share you G+ profile (say, to a friend in a bar) would you have to spell this god-knows-how-much-long id, or is there a better way (like, plus.google.com/robert_scoble) that I'm not aware of (of course, without using url shorteners)?
- antidoh 14y ago
  With unbelievably hostile URLs like that, you need to share a URL to your own site/blog/someplace that's easy to verbally share, and then link to your G+ from there. Which is an antipattern, and a smell of some sort.
- Raphael 14y ago
  It is odd to neglect readable URLs, especially considering they actually had that before on profiles.google.com.
  - jmelloy 14y ago
    I thought the story was that they were readable User IDs until fairly late in the dev process, when they realized they were giving away what people's gmail accounts were.
  - X-Istence 14y ago
    Those still work ... http://profiles.google.com/xistence http://profiles.google.com/xistence I liked that on Google Profiles I could pick my own alias, I happened to make it the same as my email address @gmail.com but there was still a choice. The number used now is not nearly as comprehensible, I hope they reintroduce something like the profiles.google.com stuff.
antidoh 14y ago
It's a really big ghost town.
udkl 14y ago
I'm not really acquainted/read about Robert, but it seems like he is defending his earlier positive take on Google+. I, like most others take an opposite stance on the matter that G+ indeed is a ghost town. Bashed Google+ a couple of days after it was launched : http://on.fb.me/LtMkTN http://on.fb.me/LtMkTN
larsberg 14y ago
G+ feels more like going to some sort of gathering where everybody is off in groups talking quietly amongst themselves. It's not empty; it's just not very interesting if you don't know anybody there. For example, the developers and researchers of compilers for functional programming languages are there and active, but scrolling through the posts, I've noticed that all of us (myself included) tend only to make the posts visible to other compiler developers. Trying to think about why that is, I can only assume it's because of the background knowledge problem. If I want to talk about random things I'm doing in our compiler to this group, I can just type up a thousand words. If I wanted to do it publicly and have it understandable, I'd have to make a Matt Might-style blog post, and the only way I would do that is if, like him, I was already preparing the contents for undergraduate consumption. Or maybe if it was content I had prepared for a paper that was too introductory and had to be cut due to page restrictions.
- pthread 14y ago
  True story. I have about 300 people in my circles mostly engineers and the interaction is great. I'm talking about people involved in FOSS (system programmers, embedded developers, devops mostly). I have no idea who R. Scoble is and just by peaking at his profile I have to say that I have no interest in following him. This is probably why most people that use Twitter don't fit in the G+ space. As far as I'm concerned most technical Twitter users are Web developers, the SEO (crap) crowd, designers, social media whores, guys posting about hipster bands. Not to generalize but that's how I see it and the reason Twitter is a ghost town for me, Facebook is useless and G+ is awesome. To each his own.
  - eps 14y ago
    There's plenty of technical people active on Twitter, but they don't tweet to start a conversation, because Twiiter was never actually menat for that. It's a one-to-many broadcast channel, there are producers and there are consumers. G+ on the other hand is more of an equal playing field, it's being positioned as an interaction platform, so it's better fit for discussions and what not.
  - haberman 14y ago
javery 14y ago
Would you rather have 200k followers who see everything you say (twitter) or 1.5M followers who never login and check out what is going on? Simple choice for me. This is also the natural evolution of social networks - when they start the social media guys are the most followed because they are the most active, then they are eclipsed by true celebrities. Scoble added 30k followers on twitter in 3 months - Howard Stern added 150k in the same time frame, Rihanna added 5M followers.
piyushpr 14y ago
How much google paid him to write that ? :P
yanw 14y ago
It's the result of PR attacks and sadly they seem to be working. Some of those writing are just parroting PR pitches and some just seem to depend on their limited experience with he service. Also considering that the number of active users is but a fraction of the overall number of those who signed up (yet still a considerable amount) it's not fair to divide active minutes between all registered users. It might be a "ghost town" in comparison to Facebook but so is every other social service the tech blogs seem to be paddling, it's just that + is a bigger target for PR attacks.
- cliffbean 14y ago
  Besides PR campaigns, I wonder if another source of hostility to Google+ is a normal human reaction to the fact that social networking, as we currently know it, is a natural monopoly. A lot of people are in the situation where they're going to have to be on Facebook no matter what (hello lock-in), and they'd really rather not have to be on Google+ at the same time. It'd be all the annoying parts of social networking doubled, plus the hassle of maintaining two copies of a lot of information, with no significant advantages. I think a lot of people who disparage Google+ would have no major objection if it could quickly take over from Facebook and become the new monopoly. However, by this point it seems unlikely, barring a major event. A world where social networking services could interoperate, sort of like how we have numerous telephone companies but one global namespace of phone numbers, would be interesting.
shortformblog 14y ago
Personal take: G+'s circle system has significant downsides as far as following people goes, because you can build a significant audience on G+ … and have no idea where it's coming from. I have 16k followers, most gained in the past few months, but I haven't updated regularly since January. There's no way to track this, either. That to me suggests weaknesses in the circle system. So, when I read Scoble's comments about having more followers on G+ than anywhere else, I believe it … and I also believe more than half of them aren't regularly using G+, either.
franze 14y ago
hi, just as a note: i can never view Roberts S. posts - because they are not public, but shared with his circles - and I'm not one of them (i don't want to, i even once - longlongtimeago - wrote a r.s. filter greasemonkey script http://www.facesaerch.com/widget/rs-filter.user.js http://www.facesaerch.com/widget/rs-filter.user.js). so would be cool - if it's really newsworthy - to post a pasteboard copy. thx.
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  https://gist.github.com/83c2056de827c779ced5 https://gist.github.com/83c2056de827c779ced5
- esrauch 14y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. All of his posts that people see are posted to public. Posting to your circles is the lists that you have created, he's not curating lists of >1million people. There isn't any way to limit the visibility of a post just to people who are following you on google+
  - franze 14y ago
    you are right. an anonymous browser tab could access the post. my g+ logged in browser tab couldn't. means: r.s. blocked me. i'm fine with it. i remember i once posted a lengthly comment (with lots of numbers, figures using an advanced statistic methodology called arithmetic) on one of his posts. so much for googles open web approach: "public" != publicly available if you are logged in to google+
    - Drbble 14y ago
      http://googleplus.wonderhowto.com/blog/new-google-12-tips-master-basics-get-you-addicted-0128716/ http://googleplus.wonderhowto.com/blog/new-google-12-tips-ma... Item 2 there claims blockers can view public posts, which seems the intended behavior.
      - franze 14y ago
citricsquid 14y ago
Robert Scoble makes his money by having lots of followers, so obviously follower counts matter to him, but they have absolutely no bearing on whether or not a site is a "ghost town" or not. I can follow Robert Scoble on G+ and NEVER interact with any of his content, so can 1,500,000 others (which is what has happened) and somehow that isn't a ghost town? If you want real hard evidence that G+ is a ghost town (in that nobody uses it): Robert Scoble posted a video yesterday: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJYuub https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJY... and that video got 778 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLhi1VUbmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLhi1VUbmc). Out of 1,500,000 "followers" on Google+ less than 1,000 take notice of his posts. That's even worse than Twitter.
- mladenkovacevic 14y ago
  I think you're putting too much value on that one data point in order to prove the "ghost town" theory. Scoble actually gets crazy amounts of interaction with his posts. Just look at how many comments each of his posts get, not to mention that every dicussion is on point and "right there". And it's not just quantifiable interaction like comments. For example, I generally don't comment on posts from people I don't know but on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written...because he's Scoble you know? His is a kind of self-fueling notoriety. I think it's definitely arguable whether G+ is a ghost town or not, but Scoble is probably the last example you should use to argue the pro-ghost-town side.
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    Photo gallery from the Golden Gate National Cemetery, +295 and 57 comments. Photo gallery from his son's graduation, +135 and 31 comments. Video (that I posted above), +107 with 17 comments. Video of "Engagio", +40 with 8 comments. He has 1,500,000 followers and his best post gets ~300 +1's and ~60 comments, the average post gets ~100 +1s and ~30 comments. The only reason the post about G+ not being a ghost town is popular is because it was spread around the internet (eg: HN) and it's flame bait... > on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written And will you actually pay attention to it? Consume the content? If you're not watching the videos he posts or reading his writing you're not engaged. Less than 1,000 people out of 1,500,000 people clicked on his video, they didn't even need to watch it for a view to count, just click on it. How can you claim for one second that he has an engaged audience when less than 0.05% of his audience click his video. I have better engagement than that on Twitter and Facebook and I'm some no-name internet guy. If the engagement levels for posts are less than 1% I don't think it can be considered active at all. Follower counts are meaningless, I think the majority of "Social Media" sites get it wrong: someone that followed me 4 years ago probably isn't still (actively) following me today, but if follower counts only reflected actively engaged users people like Scoble would cry because it doesn't validate their whole "I'm super popular hire me" shtick. I've said it before, Scoble is a part of the Mashable type of Social Media, people subscribe that don't really care about what he says they just follow/subscribe because of what he represents: Social Media. They feel that to be relevant in Social Media they have to follow Scoble, just like they have to read Mashable. They don't care about them or engage with their content, they just subscribe so they can say they do. Mashable has 2.6m Twitter followers, tweets an article and gets 6 comments. Worthless.
ddon 14y ago
Can't read his post, safari crashes on iPad :)
Cosman246 14y ago
Of course, nobody heard his comments because he posted them on G+.
falling 14y ago
Why are people listening to Scoble? Why do we see him posted here only when he says that G+ is not desert? (of course it's not desert for him: his follower count is the closest approximation to G+'s total user count)
jsz0 14y ago
I have no doubt his feed, or whatever Google calls it, is very active. Problem is mine is not. Last time I checked the newest update was almost 3 months old. Which experience is more common? Mine or his? He's stoking social media nearly 24x7 and is a fairly high profile tech something or another.
digisth 14y ago
I think some of the issues around this come down to the way we conceive of these networks (well, and semantics.) They're all called Social Networks, but that should phrase be construed very broadly. If people are using Facebook to keep in touch with a small circle, Twitter to a broad audience, and G+ as an RSS reader with pictures and a +1 button, then they aren't the same thing at all. Feet, bikes, and cars are all kinds of transportation, but they're thought of differently. We don't talk about the failures of feet because people don't walk enough. It's how and why these things are being used that defines what they are. Perhaps if Google embraced (and re-branded) itself as a content network/social content network/RSS reader with glowing bells things would be understood (and talked about) differently.
sad_panda 14y ago
My G+ feed isn't very active, but the signal to noise ratio is higher. That's fine by me.
physicslover 14y ago
As someone else mentioned, I find the signal to noise ratio to be much higher on G+ than facebook or twitter. I mainly use these tools for two purposes, keeping in touch with friends and following interesting people and topics. Facebook wins for the former as most of my friends still aren't on G+ or twitter, however, most of the activity is uninteresting checkins and the like. With twitter, I have followed people I am interested in for topical content, but I mostly see personal tweets and find myself quickly scrolling through them for an occasional interesting link. Also, the interaction is next to zero except for retweets. I don't think the medium lends itself to much more than light banter. In contrast, on plus, the topical content is more informative often with interesting comments.
egypturnash 14y ago
Scoble has 1.5 million followers on G+? I submit that followers on G+ are EASY. I've been using Livejournal since 2002 and have about 350 followers. I think maybe a hundred of them are still commenting on my posts intermittently. (Yeah, I still use LJ.) I got on G+ when it came out. I have 232 followers. I think maybe three of them reply to my posts. Sometimes. (Not that I post to G+ a lot but still.) That's a hell of a lot of followers in about eight months versus like 5-6 years of LJ being a pretty active place. It's not the 1.5mil Scoble has but it's a hell of a lot for someone who never posts, but seems to see a new follower every day. I would also compare and contrast the age and follower count of my Twitter account, but I'm pretty sure a large percentage of my nearly 600 followers there are spambots or marketroids, and I don't feel like guesstimating how many actual humans are following my tweets.

87 points by jeffool 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

I use G+ more frequently than FB and I enjoy better signal/noise ratio in my G+ streams. I suppose both FB and G+ miss interest-based approach which makes them still more noisy than they should be.

tferris 14y ago

Social bloggers as Scoble are generally useless but this time he raised an interesting point: Twitter is the ghost town not G+ and he brought some impressive figures proving that. I don't know if he's right, I reduced time in all networks but Twitter is slightly before G+: - FB 1-5 times/day - Instagram 1-5 times/week - LinkedIn 1-2 times/week - Twitter once per week (at max) - G+ never - Path never I think his large number of followers on G+ is a result of his very early engagement on G+ spamming the network around the clock. Moreover, the Twitter audience is not a perfect match for Scoble—his posts have a special style, verbose and opinionated and obviously don't appeal to the typical Twitter user (tech and Internet savvy who are often better informed than Scoble himself).

DizzyDoo 14y ago
I use Twitter in a very different way than Facebook though, and for very different reasons. I follow a small group of smart, funny or creative people that tweet really interesting stuff, but personally I tweet only a few times a month. Am I alone in that I don't use Twitter as a social networking tool, and more of a broadcasting-listening tool? To anyone looking at my twitter, it might seem extremely quiet and ghost-townish, but I am using Twitter much more than Facebook and getting more from it, albeit passively.
- jeffool 14y ago
  Twitter is, for me, very much a "right now" tool. I used to read up on missed posts, but now I just follow too many people. So I look at the recent history of a couple of lists, then look at even less of my main stream for interesting conversations/links. FB/G+ feel far more involved, even if I'm doing the same thing. I chalk this up to the conversations being longer, and more in depth/nuanced.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  I use it the same way as you do.
Jd 14y ago
For me the Twitter use case is to keep myself stimulated while working remotely by interactions with other people in my field, catch breaking news as it happens (e.g. blog articles on new tech), and to promote work that I have done (e.g. blog articles I have written). So when I am working actively on a project, I probably check 4-6 times a day. In between I probably check 2 times / week. I also have used monitoring tools like awe.sm to see how many people re-tweet things that I tweet out, among other things to make sure I'm providing value to people that are following me (i.e. high signal to noise ratio). I also use twitter to answer questions that I can't find the answers to elsewhere -- generally very technical questions. Facebook is a tricky one, since it promotes addictive "stalking" behavior. I've attempted to use it primarily for messaging and to hide most people who aren't in my immediate vicinity, thinking that I probably don't need to know what they are doing. Still, I am a part of "liking" tribes where there is an implicit economy of trading likes on something and receiving likes back. G+ I only use when I get annoying messages from Google that someone has asked me a question or added me to some circle. Other than that I avoid it like the plague -- this despite being an enthusiastic adopter in the early days. LinkedIn I use probably once a month, except in the occasional moments where I am actively networking. I get very little value here since I am not usually looking for work and the technical folks I interact with are available on Twitter (or, at worse, email).
minikomi 14y ago
Twitter was amazing just after the big quake hit here in Japan. Facebook also proved useful, but the cell networks were simply not able to handle the traffic and all my friends switched to twitter to communicate.

Iv 14y ago

G+ has far less updates that facebook on my account, and that's a feature ! People there don't post they have been wasted yesterday or they ate a mayonnaise sandwich. They share relevant news. I don't check facebook much anymore...

jeffool 14y ago

I've long sworn off Facebook, and have always been rather active on Twitter. I just hope G+ gets a good, functional mobile layout. I'm not sure how I feel about the current one yet. Everyone I know is on Facebook, and nearly everyone is on Twitter (with more joining just this week.) I have a large group of friends from a web community that all joined G+ at the same time, so, it's a completely valid social network for me, without having to do any work of reorganizing friends from high school who add me. Basically, for me it's a second chance at adding people on a social network, and this time, with easier tools, I'm getting it right.

Drbble 14y ago
Did you see the new iOS and Android versions that launched last week?
- jeffool 14y ago
  I did, thanks! That's the one I'm not sure if I like. The previous one mundane, but functional. The new one trades in the conversational flow for ease of interaction (+1-ing, sharing, more options from the stream.) It's an interesting take, and I'm curious how I'll like it, but I haven't decided yet.

angryasian 14y ago

for everyone that says g+ is a ghost town, you must not be finding people to follow. The entire point is circles. I'm on g+ everyday, and even has become my bookmark and evernote replacement, ill post to myself.

kinleyd 14y ago
This is often the problem. Unless you are some kind of star in your own right, the odds are that almost nobody beyond random followers are going to include you in their circles. That basically leaves you with the option of circling others in order to have anything meaningful in your stream. Here again you are more or less guaranteed (in current conditions) that next to none of your friends/family is going to be on G+. So you are left with the option of circling strangers only, which is not what you would normally do on a social network. The great thing about G+ is that in this large group of strangers there is a huge number of tech (and other) luminaries who are actively engaging on the network. Circle them and you basically get a stream of comments, thoughts, links and pictures that are really worth following. I've only circled about a 100 or so of these "strangers" and I've just loving the interaction. Sure, nobody (or very few) +1 anything I have to say, but that doesn't bother me as I'm far more interested in what they have to say. No way you can call it a ghost town when you engage in G+ this way. On the other hand, if you circle nobody then it does become a ghost town. But it would hardly be fair to call it one.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  I wonder if that's part of the point. On other social networks you're connecting with friends and family. On G+ you're circling strangers whose thoughts you're interested in. I think I'd prefer to mine the latter if my goal was to make better search results for you.
  - technoslut 14y ago
    The problem is that G+ seems to only get the people who are technology driven. Even then it's a fraction of that community. The 'average Joe' doesn't have any use for this. They can follow their friends on Facebook or follow their favorite celebrities on Twitter.

Swizec 14y ago

I don't use G+ for anything other than spamming links to my blog. Interestingly enough I have almost 2k "followers" despite never engaging with anyone beyond the comments on my blogs. Twitter, on the other hand, I spend my whole days there. It doesn't get as many clickthroughs to my blog, but it's magnificent for chatting with people and keeping in touch with interesting people I would like to get to know (rather than those I already know). As for FB ... there is still nothing better for organizing group events between scatterbrained friends.

udp 14y ago
> Interestingly enough I have almost 2k "followers" despite never engaging with anyone beyond the comments on my blogs. Are you part of the HN circle, by any chance?
- Swizec 14y ago
  Uhm ... I might be, how do I check?
  - udp 14y ago
    Looks like you're in part 2: https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts The circles were generated from a list at http://hngp.axxim.net/ http://hngp.axxim.net/, but that seems to be offline now.

lmm 14y ago

My G+ account really is a ghost town. I would close it if I could figure out how to without killing my gmail etc. My twitter account /looks/ like a ghost town, in that I never do anything on it myself. But I'm using it to follow a bunch of feeds I'm interested in; I check it regularly. I'm not sure how an outside observer could tell the difference between the two, other than by counting logins - but for me, twitter is useful, and G+ is dead.

k-mcgrady 14y ago
You can close your Google Plus account in settings. I did it a few months ago. I later reactivated it and it restored my account with all my followers (it had removed all my old posts and profile information though). In settings it will warn you exactly what Google services will be affected by closing your G+ account.

Steko 14y ago

Pretty much every "G+ is a ghost town" thread I've read includes the caveat "unless you're Robert Scoble". Hilariously applicable at this moment.

vibrunazo 14y ago
Or a photographer, apparently their community is huge there: https://plus.google.com/u/0/109572812341174932454/posts/5D2ymHLVkXE https://plus.google.com/u/0/109572812341174932454/posts/5D2y...
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Funny Orphans of Flickr now go to Picasa and 500px (the G+ photo album imports from Picasa Web IIRC) G+ are definitely an improvement over Picasa but it still doesn't feel right
- rjsamson 14y ago
  Yeah, G+ had a really great, vibrant photography community. People like Trey Ratcliff have really done an amazing job getting people engaged there.

NZ_Matt 14y ago

The people that I see on Google+ use it in a very different way than the average user uses Facebook. It's much closer aligned to Twitter than Facebook. The average Facebook user uses it as a tool to keep in touch with family and friends. Google+ is a ghost town for most new users, a few of my non techie friends joined Google+ when it first launched and haven't been back since because their friends are still using Facebook. Scoble and most Google+ users are outliers. The majority of users want a social network to share with their friends and they are not interested in following a bunch of random people.

stephenhandley 14y ago

G+ is more about building an interest graph than FB, don't use it as a vanity/foodiate platform and it won't be a ghosttown. I'm mostly on it for link following and I'm getting super high quality science and tech links in my feed. the ghost-town characterization is way off base.

SkyMarshal 14y ago
Completely agree, only problem is that your interest feed relies on the people you subscribe to keep their posts related to the interest you associated them with. But if the scientists in your NASA circle want to post vacation pictures, you can't filter that out. You can try and get yourself included into their "Space News Only" circle, which would solve the problem, but badgering people who don't know you to do something for you, even little like this, isn't an optimal solution.

k-mcgrady 14y ago

I like G+ but it is a ghost town. If you follow enough people you will get good content but interaction is terrible. In the first few weeks I built up over 1500 'followers'. If I posed a question I would get responses. Now, nothing. If I ask a question I may get, at most, one response a few days later. Compare this with twitter where I have under 300 followers and get several responses instantly. I also find that to regularly get new content on G+ I have to follow lots more people than I do on Twitter. People seem to post a lot less frequently on G+ (a lot of people only post a few times a week). This is a problem for me because unlike Scoble I don't want to manage circles with tens of thousands of people. Eventually that will get unmanageable and unlike Scoble management of my social media accounts isn't part of my job.

saraid216 14y ago
I find I get much, much better engagement if I spend time in someone else's comments. As for circle management, I've never had an issue with that. I follow 2k people and I just wait for someone to get annoying before I uncircle them. If they're never annoying, don't post, or whatever, then I don't notice and it's no skin off my back. I just circle people with interesting streams and just watch it come in. I haven't adjusted my circles since August or so when I made one to share to.

gautamc 14y ago

For me FB is the proverbial ghost town - because I am no longer interested in the contents of activity feed I get on FB :-p . I am sure my opinions don't matter much, after all, I don't have thousands of friends on either of the two services. But for whatever its worth, I've started to really like G+ since I've started to follow Linus Torvalds and Stephen Kinsella on G+. I like the drag-drop UI that "Circles" tab/widget implements and I love the posts that Linus shares with the public. I don't know if Linus has/uses FB too, but I don't care. I think that if Google runs G+ long enough and has cool & intelligent people using/developing it, G+ will not do too bad.

robryan 14y ago

Have they made it easier to follow say someones tech updates only. I remember early on there was the issue that circles didn't work when you were circling someone but they weren't circling you, so you would get their public updates, but that lost the ability to segregate to what people are interested in.

pooriaazimi 14y ago

Off-topic: I don't use G+ (or Facebook, for that matter), but I've always wondered what's with its disgusting, un-humanish urls. It's Scobble's (I presume): https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853 https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853 What the hell is that? If you wanted to share you G+ profile (say, to a friend in a bar) would you have to spell this god-knows-how-much-long id, or is there a better way (like, plus.google.com/robert_scoble) that I'm not aware of (of course, without using url shorteners)?

antidoh 14y ago
With unbelievably hostile URLs like that, you need to share a URL to your own site/blog/someplace that's easy to verbally share, and then link to your G+ from there. Which is an antipattern, and a smell of some sort.
Raphael 14y ago
It is odd to neglect readable URLs, especially considering they actually had that before on profiles.google.com.
- jmelloy 14y ago
  I thought the story was that they were readable User IDs until fairly late in the dev process, when they realized they were giving away what people's gmail accounts were.
- X-Istence 14y ago
  Those still work ... http://profiles.google.com/xistence http://profiles.google.com/xistence I liked that on Google Profiles I could pick my own alias, I happened to make it the same as my email address @gmail.com but there was still a choice. The number used now is not nearly as comprehensible, I hope they reintroduce something like the profiles.google.com stuff.

antidoh 14y ago

It's a really big ghost town.

udkl 14y ago

I'm not really acquainted/read about Robert, but it seems like he is defending his earlier positive take on Google+. I, like most others take an opposite stance on the matter that G+ indeed is a ghost town. Bashed Google+ a couple of days after it was launched : http://on.fb.me/LtMkTN http://on.fb.me/LtMkTN

larsberg 14y ago

G+ feels more like going to some sort of gathering where everybody is off in groups talking quietly amongst themselves. It's not empty; it's just not very interesting if you don't know anybody there. For example, the developers and researchers of compilers for functional programming languages are there and active, but scrolling through the posts, I've noticed that all of us (myself included) tend only to make the posts visible to other compiler developers. Trying to think about why that is, I can only assume it's because of the background knowledge problem. If I want to talk about random things I'm doing in our compiler to this group, I can just type up a thousand words. If I wanted to do it publicly and have it understandable, I'd have to make a Matt Might-style blog post, and the only way I would do that is if, like him, I was already preparing the contents for undergraduate consumption. Or maybe if it was content I had prepared for a paper that was too introductory and had to be cut due to page restrictions.

pthread 14y ago
True story. I have about 300 people in my circles mostly engineers and the interaction is great. I'm talking about people involved in FOSS (system programmers, embedded developers, devops mostly). I have no idea who R. Scoble is and just by peaking at his profile I have to say that I have no interest in following him. This is probably why most people that use Twitter don't fit in the G+ space. As far as I'm concerned most technical Twitter users are Web developers, the SEO (crap) crowd, designers, social media whores, guys posting about hipster bands. Not to generalize but that's how I see it and the reason Twitter is a ghost town for me, Facebook is useless and G+ is awesome. To each his own.
- eps 14y ago
  There's plenty of technical people active on Twitter, but they don't tweet to start a conversation, because Twiiter was never actually menat for that. It's a one-to-many broadcast channel, there are producers and there are consumers. G+ on the other hand is more of an equal playing field, it's being positioned as an interaction platform, so it's better fit for discussions and what not.
- haberman 14y ago

javery 14y ago

Would you rather have 200k followers who see everything you say (twitter) or 1.5M followers who never login and check out what is going on? Simple choice for me. This is also the natural evolution of social networks - when they start the social media guys are the most followed because they are the most active, then they are eclipsed by true celebrities. Scoble added 30k followers on twitter in 3 months - Howard Stern added 150k in the same time frame, Rihanna added 5M followers.

piyushpr 14y ago

How much google paid him to write that ? :P

yanw 14y ago

It's the result of PR attacks and sadly they seem to be working. Some of those writing are just parroting PR pitches and some just seem to depend on their limited experience with he service. Also considering that the number of active users is but a fraction of the overall number of those who signed up (yet still a considerable amount) it's not fair to divide active minutes between all registered users. It might be a "ghost town" in comparison to Facebook but so is every other social service the tech blogs seem to be paddling, it's just that + is a bigger target for PR attacks.

cliffbean 14y ago
Besides PR campaigns, I wonder if another source of hostility to Google+ is a normal human reaction to the fact that social networking, as we currently know it, is a natural monopoly. A lot of people are in the situation where they're going to have to be on Facebook no matter what (hello lock-in), and they'd really rather not have to be on Google+ at the same time. It'd be all the annoying parts of social networking doubled, plus the hassle of maintaining two copies of a lot of information, with no significant advantages. I think a lot of people who disparage Google+ would have no major objection if it could quickly take over from Facebook and become the new monopoly. However, by this point it seems unlikely, barring a major event. A world where social networking services could interoperate, sort of like how we have numerous telephone companies but one global namespace of phone numbers, would be interesting.

shortformblog 14y ago

Personal take: G+'s circle system has significant downsides as far as following people goes, because you can build a significant audience on G+ … and have no idea where it's coming from. I have 16k followers, most gained in the past few months, but I haven't updated regularly since January. There's no way to track this, either. That to me suggests weaknesses in the circle system. So, when I read Scoble's comments about having more followers on G+ than anywhere else, I believe it … and I also believe more than half of them aren't regularly using G+, either.

franze 14y ago

hi, just as a note: i can never view Roberts S. posts - because they are not public, but shared with his circles - and I'm not one of them (i don't want to, i even once - longlongtimeago - wrote a r.s. filter greasemonkey script http://www.facesaerch.com/widget/rs-filter.user.js http://www.facesaerch.com/widget/rs-filter.user.js). so would be cool - if it's really newsworthy - to post a pasteboard copy. thx.

mattdeboard 14y ago
https://gist.github.com/83c2056de827c779ced5 https://gist.github.com/83c2056de827c779ced5
esrauch 14y ago
That doesn't make any sense. All of his posts that people see are posted to public. Posting to your circles is the lists that you have created, he's not curating lists of >1million people. There isn't any way to limit the visibility of a post just to people who are following you on google+
- franze 14y ago
  you are right. an anonymous browser tab could access the post. my g+ logged in browser tab couldn't. means: r.s. blocked me. i'm fine with it. i remember i once posted a lengthly comment (with lots of numbers, figures using an advanced statistic methodology called arithmetic) on one of his posts. so much for googles open web approach: "public" != publicly available if you are logged in to google+
  - Drbble 14y ago
    http://googleplus.wonderhowto.com/blog/new-google-12-tips-master-basics-get-you-addicted-0128716/ http://googleplus.wonderhowto.com/blog/new-google-12-tips-ma... Item 2 there claims blockers can view public posts, which seems the intended behavior.
    - franze 14y ago

citricsquid 14y ago

Robert Scoble makes his money by having lots of followers, so obviously follower counts matter to him, but they have absolutely no bearing on whether or not a site is a "ghost town" or not. I can follow Robert Scoble on G+ and NEVER interact with any of his content, so can 1,500,000 others (which is what has happened) and somehow that isn't a ghost town? If you want real hard evidence that G+ is a ghost town (in that nobody uses it): Robert Scoble posted a video yesterday: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJYuub https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJY... and that video got 778 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLhi1VUbmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLhi1VUbmc). Out of 1,500,000 "followers" on Google+ less than 1,000 take notice of his posts. That's even worse than Twitter.

mladenkovacevic 14y ago
I think you're putting too much value on that one data point in order to prove the "ghost town" theory. Scoble actually gets crazy amounts of interaction with his posts. Just look at how many comments each of his posts get, not to mention that every dicussion is on point and "right there". And it's not just quantifiable interaction like comments. For example, I generally don't comment on posts from people I don't know but on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written...because he's Scoble you know? His is a kind of self-fueling notoriety. I think it's definitely arguable whether G+ is a ghost town or not, but Scoble is probably the last example you should use to argue the pro-ghost-town side.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  Photo gallery from the Golden Gate National Cemetery, +295 and 57 comments. Photo gallery from his son's graduation, +135 and 31 comments. Video (that I posted above), +107 with 17 comments. Video of "Engagio", +40 with 8 comments. He has 1,500,000 followers and his best post gets ~300 +1's and ~60 comments, the average post gets ~100 +1s and ~30 comments. The only reason the post about G+ not being a ghost town is popular is because it was spread around the internet (eg: HN) and it's flame bait... > on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written And will you actually pay attention to it? Consume the content? If you're not watching the videos he posts or reading his writing you're not engaged. Less than 1,000 people out of 1,500,000 people clicked on his video, they didn't even need to watch it for a view to count, just click on it. How can you claim for one second that he has an engaged audience when less than 0.05% of his audience click his video. I have better engagement than that on Twitter and Facebook and I'm some no-name internet guy. If the engagement levels for posts are less than 1% I don't think it can be considered active at all. Follower counts are meaningless, I think the majority of "Social Media" sites get it wrong: someone that followed me 4 years ago probably isn't still (actively) following me today, but if follower counts only reflected actively engaged users people like Scoble would cry because it doesn't validate their whole "I'm super popular hire me" shtick. I've said it before, Scoble is a part of the Mashable type of Social Media, people subscribe that don't really care about what he says they just follow/subscribe because of what he represents: Social Media. They feel that to be relevant in Social Media they have to follow Scoble, just like they have to read Mashable. They don't care about them or engage with their content, they just subscribe so they can say they do. Mashable has 2.6m Twitter followers, tweets an article and gets 6 comments. Worthless.

ddon 14y ago

Can't read his post, safari crashes on iPad :)

Cosman246 14y ago

Of course, nobody heard his comments because he posted them on G+.

falling 14y ago

Why are people listening to Scoble? Why do we see him posted here only when he says that G+ is not desert? (of course it's not desert for him: his follower count is the closest approximation to G+'s total user count)

jsz0 14y ago

I have no doubt his feed, or whatever Google calls it, is very active. Problem is mine is not. Last time I checked the newest update was almost 3 months old. Which experience is more common? Mine or his? He's stoking social media nearly 24x7 and is a fairly high profile tech something or another.

digisth 14y ago

I think some of the issues around this come down to the way we conceive of these networks (well, and semantics.) They're all called Social Networks, but that should phrase be construed very broadly. If people are using Facebook to keep in touch with a small circle, Twitter to a broad audience, and G+ as an RSS reader with pictures and a +1 button, then they aren't the same thing at all. Feet, bikes, and cars are all kinds of transportation, but they're thought of differently. We don't talk about the failures of feet because people don't walk enough. It's how and why these things are being used that defines what they are. Perhaps if Google embraced (and re-branded) itself as a content network/social content network/RSS reader with glowing bells things would be understood (and talked about) differently.

sad_panda 14y ago

My G+ feed isn't very active, but the signal to noise ratio is higher. That's fine by me.

physicslover 14y ago

As someone else mentioned, I find the signal to noise ratio to be much higher on G+ than facebook or twitter. I mainly use these tools for two purposes, keeping in touch with friends and following interesting people and topics. Facebook wins for the former as most of my friends still aren't on G+ or twitter, however, most of the activity is uninteresting checkins and the like. With twitter, I have followed people I am interested in for topical content, but I mostly see personal tweets and find myself quickly scrolling through them for an occasional interesting link. Also, the interaction is next to zero except for retweets. I don't think the medium lends itself to much more than light banter. In contrast, on plus, the topical content is more informative often with interesting comments.

egypturnash 14y ago

Scoble has 1.5 million followers on G+? I submit that followers on G+ are EASY. I've been using Livejournal since 2002 and have about 350 followers. I think maybe a hundred of them are still commenting on my posts intermittently. (Yeah, I still use LJ.) I got on G+ when it came out. I have 232 followers. I think maybe three of them reply to my posts. Sometimes. (Not that I post to G+ a lot but still.) That's a hell of a lot of followers in about eight months versus like 5-6 years of LJ being a pretty active place. It's not the 1.5mil Scoble has but it's a hell of a lot for someone who never posts, but seems to see a new follower every day. I would also compare and contrast the age and follower count of my Twitter account, but I'm pretty sure a large percentage of my nearly 600 followers there are spambots or marketroids, and I don't feel like guesstimating how many actual humans are following my tweets.