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Yes, but I know dozens of people on LinkedIn. I know one active Google+ user and he's a bit of a Google fanboy to begin with. None of the non-techie people I k

Yes, but I know dozens of people on LinkedIn. I know one active Google+ user and he's a bit of a Google fanboy to begin with. None of the non-techie people I know use Google+ or even mention it at all.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
That's a good point. I don't recall the last time I saw a non-techie even mention G+.
stellar678 14y ago
I think G+ is going to worm its way in by offering add-ons that actually draw people in. The two major examples for me are Hangouts and the fact that G+ posts from 'important' people appear in Google News rollups about a particular story. Hangouts are really the only reason I've ever seen a non-techie use G+, and they work really well. People seem to try Skype and then realize that there are weird rules about having to pay if you want group video chat, so people hop over to G+ and it just works. And the news thing seems really interesting to me because it seems to highlight provocative things said by public personalities and then lets everyone with a Google account join the discussion as 'part of Google plus'. That seems like something that could get pretty sticky.
- creativityland 14y ago
  I'm also seeing more google results to G+ pages instead of the wikipedia page when searching for names, famous people, topics, places and so on. Coincidence?
  - smacktoward 14y ago
    If not coincidence, an anti-trust suit waiting to happen...
  - stellar678 14y ago
    Are you seeing them as organic search results, or as "social search" features added into the mix? I can't say I've seen a lot of G+ pages as organic results, but they do seem to feel free to inject links to social media profiles when they're related in some way to a search result.
huggyface 14y ago
Yes, but I know dozens of people on LinkedIn. I know one active Google+ user and he's a bit of a Google fanboy to begin with. Why is there the need to respond to data with anecdotes? If I give a Google+ growth anecdote, does that invalidate yours? I have no idea why Google+ is being compared to LinkedIn. They have very little overlap. Even among Facebook and Google+ the overlap is limited. Nonetheless Google keeps iterating on the product and it seems to be paying off. The Android Google+ client is now superb, and the content richness seems to be greatly improving, particularly in the tech field. Which is important because the tech field is what generally leads the growth curve.
- hyperbovine 14y ago
  > Why is there the need to respond to data with anecdotes? Why, haven't you heard? The plural of anecdote is data! :-)
- incongruity 14y ago
  Because data can also lie. The key here is that the number reported is "unique visitors" – what, exactly, is this telling us? Not much at all because it says nothing of intent, much less duration of stay on that page or frequency of use. In the absence of that additional data, anecdotes can be useful to express doubt or confusion about data that seems to not pass the sniff-test. It can be as minimal as "is it just me, or does ... ?" sort of constructions or it can be more formalized to say – "This doesn't fit with my personal observations". The mistake is thinking that anecdotes add up to data – they don't – but put enough of them together and they can be heuristically valuable – and one on its own, in the absence of other real data, is still a completely valid construct for conversational purposes or to challenge (albeit weakly) some over-cooked claim, like what I'm seeing here, with the google+ traffic data. The refutation of such an anecdotal experience with sound evidence doesn't mean the the anecdote was worthless – hardly. It was valuable because it was provocative.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    OP: Wrong. Anecdote: Wrong. incongruity: Two wrongs make a right!
vibrunazo 14y ago
Obviously anecdotal. One explanation might be G+ international popularity. A quick look at "what's hot" and you'll see plenty of center and eastern asian names on the comments. The Android developer relations team makes weekly public hangouts in different time zones. I tried a few different ones out of curiosity and noticed that both the Indian and Brazilian ones are much more popular than the american hangout (which is the only that is live from the Googleplex, so you'd assume this would be the most popular). Maybe the bunch of google+ audience just happen to not be part of your social circle. Personally, I'd love to see some g+ usage statistics divided by demographics to confirm this hypothesis. (specially since the author explicits these numbers are from US only, not sure if that's right) edit: G+ also seem to be extremely popular on very specific niches other than technology. Such as photograph and science. In fact, g+ developers make a big deal about their product being developed from and to photographers. You'll notice their mobile app focuses the whole experience on large beautiful photos because of it. Every day there's a different photographer-focused hashtag trending (today it's #TreeTuesday). So yea, anecdotes, bad.
- larrys 14y ago
  "One explanation might be G+ international popularity." Another explanation is that it's impossible to sign up for any google product (like gmail) w/o getting herded into google plus.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    They aren't counting the number of registrations but hits. Registrations will have a minimal effect on that.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    GMail numbers weren't broken out, but YouTube rivals Facebook at ~150m uniques monthly. There's been a lot made of FB (and other social networks) primarily being photo-sharing networks. While I doubt video will ever quite have the same impact (they're deeper but not as casually shared), it probably will grow as a social element, and Google are beautifully positioned in this regard.
sp332 14y ago
My extended family uses G+ hangouts to keep in touch. For 2 people Skype is actually easier, but for a bunch of people (we once had Minnesota, California, New Hampshire, and Switzerland talking together), G+ is pretty smooth.
idspispopd 14y ago
Quality of membership(i.e actual use) is more important than raw membership numbers. Those who seek out LinkedIn/Facebook/others are likely to be more interested in using the service than someone who joined G+ because their default search engine asked them to enter their google services password to instantly become a member. A comparable example is Apple's Ping. Apple doesn't tout Ping as a success because it has millions of members (who were similarly presented with a trivial sign up method in iTunes 10 - Ping registered over 1M users in the first 48 hours.) Ping, however, is rarely used by the bulk of it's members, as such it's being discontinued. Most people signed up just to see what it was like, they didn't stick around. Facebook/LinkedIn don't have this problem so much, most people already know what the services are for, so they don't need to create a profile just to see what it's like. G+ is growing, but it's an overstatement to say that it has the same level of user engagement as facebook/LinkedIn/others. While many continue with the faulty logic that G+ is a superior experience/platform so it should become the dominant service, need to revisit the learnings of Betamax: technical superiority does not equate to automatic or guaranteed success.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

That's a good point. I don't recall the last time I saw a non-techie even mention G+.

stellar678 14y ago

I think G+ is going to worm its way in by offering add-ons that actually draw people in. The two major examples for me are Hangouts and the fact that G+ posts from 'important' people appear in Google News rollups about a particular story. Hangouts are really the only reason I've ever seen a non-techie use G+, and they work really well. People seem to try Skype and then realize that there are weird rules about having to pay if you want group video chat, so people hop over to G+ and it just works. And the news thing seems really interesting to me because it seems to highlight provocative things said by public personalities and then lets everyone with a Google account join the discussion as 'part of Google plus'. That seems like something that could get pretty sticky.

creativityland 14y ago
I'm also seeing more google results to G+ pages instead of the wikipedia page when searching for names, famous people, topics, places and so on. Coincidence?
- smacktoward 14y ago
  If not coincidence, an anti-trust suit waiting to happen...
- stellar678 14y ago
  Are you seeing them as organic search results, or as "social search" features added into the mix? I can't say I've seen a lot of G+ pages as organic results, but they do seem to feel free to inject links to social media profiles when they're related in some way to a search result.

huggyface 14y ago

Yes, but I know dozens of people on LinkedIn. I know one active Google+ user and he's a bit of a Google fanboy to begin with. Why is there the need to respond to data with anecdotes? If I give a Google+ growth anecdote, does that invalidate yours? I have no idea why Google+ is being compared to LinkedIn. They have very little overlap. Even among Facebook and Google+ the overlap is limited. Nonetheless Google keeps iterating on the product and it seems to be paying off. The Android Google+ client is now superb, and the content richness seems to be greatly improving, particularly in the tech field. Which is important because the tech field is what generally leads the growth curve.

hyperbovine 14y ago
> Why is there the need to respond to data with anecdotes? Why, haven't you heard? The plural of anecdote is data! :-)
incongruity 14y ago
Because data can also lie. The key here is that the number reported is "unique visitors" – what, exactly, is this telling us? Not much at all because it says nothing of intent, much less duration of stay on that page or frequency of use. In the absence of that additional data, anecdotes can be useful to express doubt or confusion about data that seems to not pass the sniff-test. It can be as minimal as "is it just me, or does ... ?" sort of constructions or it can be more formalized to say – "This doesn't fit with my personal observations". The mistake is thinking that anecdotes add up to data – they don't – but put enough of them together and they can be heuristically valuable – and one on its own, in the absence of other real data, is still a completely valid construct for conversational purposes or to challenge (albeit weakly) some over-cooked claim, like what I'm seeing here, with the google+ traffic data. The refutation of such an anecdotal experience with sound evidence doesn't mean the the anecdote was worthless – hardly. It was valuable because it was provocative.
- saraid216 14y ago
  OP: Wrong. Anecdote: Wrong. incongruity: Two wrongs make a right!

vibrunazo 14y ago

Obviously anecdotal. One explanation might be G+ international popularity. A quick look at "what's hot" and you'll see plenty of center and eastern asian names on the comments. The Android developer relations team makes weekly public hangouts in different time zones. I tried a few different ones out of curiosity and noticed that both the Indian and Brazilian ones are much more popular than the american hangout (which is the only that is live from the Googleplex, so you'd assume this would be the most popular). Maybe the bunch of google+ audience just happen to not be part of your social circle. Personally, I'd love to see some g+ usage statistics divided by demographics to confirm this hypothesis. (specially since the author explicits these numbers are from US only, not sure if that's right) edit: G+ also seem to be extremely popular on very specific niches other than technology. Such as photograph and science. In fact, g+ developers make a big deal about their product being developed from and to photographers. You'll notice their mobile app focuses the whole experience on large beautiful photos because of it. Every day there's a different photographer-focused hashtag trending (today it's #TreeTuesday). So yea, anecdotes, bad.

larrys 14y ago
"One explanation might be G+ international popularity." Another explanation is that it's impossible to sign up for any google product (like gmail) w/o getting herded into google plus.
- icebraining 14y ago
  They aren't counting the number of registrations but hits. Registrations will have a minimal effect on that.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  GMail numbers weren't broken out, but YouTube rivals Facebook at ~150m uniques monthly. There's been a lot made of FB (and other social networks) primarily being photo-sharing networks. While I doubt video will ever quite have the same impact (they're deeper but not as casually shared), it probably will grow as a social element, and Google are beautifully positioned in this regard.

sp332 14y ago

My extended family uses G+ hangouts to keep in touch. For 2 people Skype is actually easier, but for a bunch of people (we once had Minnesota, California, New Hampshire, and Switzerland talking together), G+ is pretty smooth.

idspispopd 14y ago

Quality of membership(i.e actual use) is more important than raw membership numbers. Those who seek out LinkedIn/Facebook/others are likely to be more interested in using the service than someone who joined G+ because their default search engine asked them to enter their google services password to instantly become a member. A comparable example is Apple's Ping. Apple doesn't tout Ping as a success because it has millions of members (who were similarly presented with a trivial sign up method in iTunes 10 - Ping registered over 1M users in the first 48 hours.) Ping, however, is rarely used by the bulk of it's members, as such it's being discontinued. Most people signed up just to see what it was like, they didn't stick around. Facebook/LinkedIn don't have this problem so much, most people already know what the services are for, so they don't need to create a profile just to see what it's like. G+ is growing, but it's an overstatement to say that it has the same level of user engagement as facebook/LinkedIn/others. While many continue with the faulty logic that G+ is a superior experience/platform so it should become the dominant service, need to revisit the learnings of Betamax: technical superiority does not equate to automatic or guaranteed success.