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Vic Gundotra reports Google+ passing 100,000,000 monthly active users
- rgarcia 14y agoI'm really curious how they measure "active". For example, recently I've noticed that when I initiate a video chat in gchat it forces me to use a hangout on Google+. Does this make me an active Google+ user?
- Evbn 14y agoWhy do you consider socializing on a Google built network using a Google front end to not be a usage of Google plus? Because it wasn't called "plus" when you started? Are instagram users not really using facebook?
- k3n 14y agoI wonder if a script request to plus.google.com (say, to load the +1 widget) would count? It has to piggyback on your Google login (or else it wouldn't know who to attribute any +1's to), and so would simply loading a page that has a +1 button count as an "active user"? I don't think it's too far outside the realm of possibility.
- autophil 14y agoI'm one of those rare weirdos that actually likes and uses G+. It was my daughter that got me to join but it's a way better experience than FB, and I've been using it everyday since.
- sek 14y agoMe too, i got my whole family on there and have another peer group i share a lot of stuff with. The stuff for my family is not visible to the public. People wanted a private network like Path, what is just for mobile unfortunately.
- epoxyhockey 14y agoAdd me to the list. Last week, I wanted to upload a complete album of vacation photos to share with just my family (many of whom aren't on Facebook). G+ allows me to generate a unique link to that album without requiring anyone to sign up to view the photos. Just last night a family member wouldn't Skype with me because the software "wasn't setup" on their computer. I initiated a hangout (since they use gmail) and everything worked perfectly. Google's strategy reminds me a little bit of Microsoft's where they are the service that pops up first when people are looking to do things. As long as their product is equal to or better than their competitors, they should be able to win the slow race.
- engtech 14y agoEvery facebook album has a unique URL you can share with non-Facebook people. (just checked, yes that feature is still there. It's on the bottom of every photo album that you own)
- epoxyhockey 14y agoGood to know - thanks!
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoDoes clicking this link suddenly make me an active user?
- AustinGibbons 14y agoI would like to see a breakdown of what people do on g+. For example, using google talk to have a video conversation results in a g+ notification...
- vibrunazo 14y agoThis time Vic specified that this is people accessing plus.google.com and mobile app. So I'm reasonably sure using gtalk on gmail wouldn't count.
- ajross 14y agoClearly such a breakdown would be interesting. But in context you seem to be implying that a video call "doesn't count" as a Google+ usage. If you, say, take a Instagram photo or message someone using Facebook chat but don't look at the front page, are you "not using Facebook?". I'd expect Facebook would count you as a "user" for the day, no?
- AustinGibbons 14y agoI'm not saying 100,000 is an unfair statistic, but what I meant to get at instead was growth through g+ versus inclusion through tack-on services (a totally valid and excellent way to bring users into your product :-) as I tend to agree with some of the other comments describing it as "the path of least resistance" for sharing content through google.
- Evbn 14y agoWhen google adds plus to video chat, is that tack on? When fb adds video chat to your feed, us that tack on?
- lawdawg 14y ago
- grandalf 14y agoIn other words, Google has now activated 100,000,000 existing google and google apps accounts with the plus button on the top nav.
- vibrunazo 14y agoRead the last sentence of the post. It's only counting people who visited the g+ stream or mobile app.
- grandalf 14y agoHmm, it's still 99% the same 5 people (one of whom is Vic) on my google plus feed, even though I follow many hundreds of people. Whatever the number is, or whatever the value of the audience is, I'd judge its current state as about 1/100th of Twitter's.
- pastaking 14y agoWhat does "active" mean?
- simonh 14y agoWhat he says he means by it in the post?
- kingsley_20 14y agoI seem to have entirely unintentionally signed up for G+ 3 times with different gapps accounts. Till they fix the identity issues, no one is going to take these stats seriously.
- s_henry_paulson 14y agoThere will always be erroneous data, but monthly active users is a fairly powerful statistic.
- ryanhuff 14y agoG+ isn't the social network. G+ is their "social layer" on top of their existing services. When you take a picture on your Android phone, you have likely become an active G+ user as it uploads the picture to your G+ account. And this is likely extended to all sorts of other products that Google offers, such as Google Pages, Maps, etc. So you can't compare Google+ numbers to Facebook. Many of the user interactions with G+ are so soft that are barely "active".
- lawdawg 14y agoFrom Vic himself: "Today's number of 100m is just on our plus.google.com destination site and the mobile app. Pretty amazing." I'm going to wager that uploading a photo through instant upload doesn't count as using the mobile app.
- paulitex 14y agoYes, I saw Vic interviewed by Guy Kawasaki at SXSW this year and he basically said exactly this. He was counting active users as people who had plus accounts, were logged in, and were using any product with a plus/social component, i.e search. By this metric, I'm an 'active user' (using their search engine) despite having not visited G+ in over 6 months.
- icebraining 14y agoThat's not what he's saying now, though: Vic Gundotra +Andreas Proschofsky the numbers at I/O were google+ users all across Google. So gmail users who used circles, or Android users who plus oned an app etc were included. Today's number of 100m is just on our plus.google.com destination site and the mobile app. Pretty amazing.
- natarius 14y agoI say he lies. I know and talk to people from every part of the globe...and no one there is using it or even does know about it. This is just sad how google embarrasses itself with these obvious fake stats!!
- nico 14y agoThe only people I personally know that use Google+, are Google employees. I wonder what they consider/count as an active user.
- ergo14 14y agoAlmost all of my fellow developers (my dev circle is about 85 people) use it, i also follow quite a few of interesting product pages, also some of my friends use it - so def. there are people using it. My circles are carefully crafted so i dont see facebook like usless stuff.
- scottbartell 14y agoActive G+ user = an active gmail user?
- AaronI 14y agoDid you read the post? It's counting those who have visited the G+ stream or used the mobile app.
- rm999 14y agoI clicked on the link, and am now likely going to count as an active user because I was logged into gmail. In other words, I am NOT a g+ user, but google probably counts me as one because of my gmail account. So, scottbartell may have a valid point.
- Evbn 14y agoYou clicked the link to plus.Google.com, meaning you just acively used the site. Are you suggesting that referrals should not be counted as active uses? Now, Direct visits would be interesting to get some counts for.
- scottbartell 14y agoIt's a pretty meaningless measure - that's all I'm saying.
- anon1385 14y agoTranslation: 100 million YouTube or gmail users also read blog posts on G+ at least once a month.
- Roritharr 14y agoI visit G+ more often than Facebook nowadays. My Facebook stream is cluttered by all sorts of people, talking mostly about very private stuff. My G+ Stream is mostly links to interesting Stuff or Newsarticles. The comments are mostly very relevant and insightful, except for the ones in the recent days about the islamic riots, but that was even worse on Facebook...
- dean 14y agoI signed up my kids for Gmail recently. It seems to automatically create a Google+ account and profile, and I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to disable all that stuff. We only wanted email. I wonder if we're included in the 400 million who have upgraded to Google+.
- atirip 14y agoThis is like a reading news from Mars. Lots of martians doing something, somewhere. Interesting, but I really do not know any martian.
- lawdawg 14y agoIf I was a betting man, I would say most of the usage is not in the USA and Europe. Probably primarily in India, Asia, and South America where Google products tend to get a ton of usage. That's really nothing to be ashamed of, but it really gives the impression that no one uses G+ when the tech press is primarily located in an area which doesn't see a ton of G+ usage.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mtgx 14y agoWhat do you mean? Like country by country, or in aggregate US vs non-US? Because even for Facebook, most of the usage would be non-US, obviously, since they have 1 billion users and there aren't that many people in US. But on country by country basis, Google+ gets the most users from US by far: http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2012/02/22/google-demographics-a-look-at-the-top-5-countries-using-google-plus/ http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2012/02/22/google-dem...
- brianbreslin 14y agoI wonder how they are pushing the millions of Orkut users into it. those were huge in brazil/india for a while.
- knowtheory 14y agoI know three separate communities of varying technical prowess who have ended up on Google+ and seem to be functioning quite happily (Members of the open data/open governance community, an extended science fiction community featuring some rather well known members such as the authors of the Expanse and SMBC, and folks like Yehuda Katz). Every last one of these people is based in the USA.
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- franze 14y agoyeah, i think i clicked +1 last month (once), too. proud to be one of 100 000 000.
- cs702 14y agoGoogle's strategy with G+ is looking smarter by the day: instead of trying to compete head-on with FaceBook, Google simply made sharing via Google+ the default path of least resistance for everyone using one or more of its applications. Now there are around 400 million people sharing things on Google+ (even if many of them are doing so inadvertently), and 100 million people are visiting plus.google.com every month to access all this user-generated content. In short, Google figured out how to get the content, and now it's getting the users.
- eddieplan9 14y agoOn the other hand, I was so annoyed by the G+ notifications I now never access Google services as a logged in user. I now check gmails with Mail.app (faster than web-based GMail any way), read Google reader feeds with Reeder, and I never feel missed out. If you think this Google+ strategy is brilliant and cost-free, then I'd at least argue that it costs some long-term loyal users and annoys a whole bunch more.
- webwanderings 14y agoWhat a deceptive and misleading headline here at HN. The source says: "over 400,000,000 people have upgraded to Google+". Is there a difference between "active users" and "upgraded users"?
- mtgx 14y agoOf course. 100 mil people who use Google+ at least once a month, and the other 300 have registered with Google+ but haven't used it in the past month. The ratio seems to be 4:1 compared to Facebook's 2:1 of non-active to active monthly users (they use a very similar method to determine the active people), so I wonder why Google isn't taking more steps to reduce this ratio. Maybe they care as much about "registered users" as they do about the active ones. Maybe they just want to have everyone with their real names on file, which might explain why they might not care about the ratio of non-active to active as much.
- silverbax88 14y agoYes - there's a huge difference. Want to create a gmail account? Guess what- you've got Google+! YouTube account? AdWords? AdSense? Bingo - Google+. I use Google+ for hangouts to run our remote meetings. It works pretty well. But not much use for it beyond that. Of course, that's not saying it's any better than Facebook - I only use FB to promote stuff related to my business.
- coliveira 14y agoI clicked on G+ only to try to deactivate it. Sadly I am being counted now as an active user.
- caycep 14y agoMaybe its just who i am following on G+, but my usage patterns have roughly been: G+: great posts by prominent computer scientists, programmers, engineers (Rob Pike, Andy Herzfeld, Douglas Crockford, etc), many of whom work for google. FB: everybody else.
- callahad 14y agoIt really is all contingent on who you circle. There are a ton of active photographers and at least a handful of hydrogeologists regularly using Google+ in addition to all of the programmers. It's akin Twitter in that regard: apparently the celebrity accounts are a huge draw for an enormous set of Twitter's users, but I'm effectively oblivious to that aspect of the site.
- winter_blue 14y agoThe only thing I use Google+ for is bookmarking. It's my bitly. I have g+1 button plug-in installed on my browser, so whenever I see something interesting I bookmark it using it. Would this count as active usage? Probably. But am I actually an active user? No. I don't go to their front page everyday, check the news feed, e.t.c. So the 100 million is probably an over-estimate.
- sabret00the 14y agoI think this is feasible. There's surely a 100m geeks in the world. Also don't forget that goog.le links, open in the browser on Android phones.
- natarius 14y agoLol
- arturadib 14y agoThere must be something seriously deceptive about these stats. To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet. There may be at most a few people who occasionally post to it, and recently I've seen many switching to Twitter. Secondly, although not a perfect proxy, Google Trends shows an exponentially decaying trend that is hardly in line with their reported exponential growth: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c... Here's a zoomed-in graph in the last 12 months clearly showing the decaying tail: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c... Let's compare for example with Twitter (~140-200M actives) in the last 12 months: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit... Regardless of how you rationalize people searching for "twitter" vs. "google plus" as a proxy for active users, the decaying trend is clear. And it's hard to think of why the query "google plus" or "google+" would be 50-70 times less popular than "twitter" other than low the popularity of the service. Of course none of this is hard proof, and it's possible that my circles are just not representative of the internet as a whole and that Google Trends is a fantastically erroneous proxy for popularity, but personally I believe they're using an unrealistically optimistic metric for actives.
- Kylekramer 14y agoIsn't using Trends a pretty bad metric? I imagine most people searching for Twitter these days are just trying to get a link to their homepage. Google+ has a link to its homepage on Google search itself, so Google Trends isn't a very reliable data source.
- arturadib 14y agoSure, it's not perfect, but a factor of 70? Also, if you're going to include links from other properties you have to factor in (for example) that iOS has Twitter sign-in built in, so Twitter is also greatly underrepresented...
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- aestetix 14y agoI'm curious how many Google services make automatic calls to plus.google.com for a variety of reasons. As a former G+ user who was opted into SPYW without my consent, I tend to be skeptical of any announcements like this. Besides, why have they been so evasive of releasing numbers before?
- myspy 14y agoI'm no Google enthusiast and deactivated my G+ account a couple of months ago, and absolutely no one I'm friends with at FB was using G+. It's one of those Google things, "normal" persons, not related to IT won't use. They already have a FB account, why more social stuff? And Google in general boils down for most people to search and maybe mail. The whole Android story pulls in a lot of "normal" people, but I doubt that those will spontaneously start to get involved with G+.