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There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats, particularly the "active users" one. To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is

There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats, particularly the "active users" one. 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 switch 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.

redwood 14y ago
Active probably means one active use of a Google+ umbrella property (e.g. hangouts, youtube, etc)
- tonfa 14y ago
  According to the original plus post from Vic Gundotra, it means active use of mobile app or plus.google.com.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Be very careful of this one: "To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet." There is an interesting thing about G+ which hasn't "seeped in" to a lot of users, is that 'share with my circles' doesn't share with people who are following you but you don't have in your circles. To hit those people you need to share to 'public' (and yes there should be a share to followers which is less broad than public but that is only my opinion) Consequently you don't get as much 'fire hose' effect as you do on say twitter. And the APIs that post to Google+ are still not available as far as I can tell (pls correct if this is mistaken!) and a lot of my Facebook feed is not real news so much as auto-generated stuff from other apps. My point being that 'seeing it as quiet' isn't a good measure of anything. Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured out what G+ is, why search for it? And Google includes your G+ stuff in your search results (much to the dismay of many). I suspect the better proxy is going to find referrals from links in a G+ post. How many links are sharing, how many links are being followed, how much traffic does it drive. That will be a better measure of its success I expect.
- arturadib 14y ago
  > Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured out what G+ is, why search for it? Same applies to Twitter, so the comparison is fair.
  - ok_craig 14y ago
    I think that what he means is, if you're on G+ and you go to Google, there's already a link to your G+ profile at the top for you. You just click it, instead of searching. And then if you want to find something specific maybe you do the search in G+.
    - arturadib 14y ago
      If we're going to include external links we should also remember that Twitter is built into iOS, so it's stats are also severely underrepresented. Yet their Google Trends curves are going in opposite directions...
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    I'm not arguing that it is a wrong comparison, I'm arguing that it is different. My claim is that Google works hard to make sure you see Google+ results regardless so explicitly searching for them is not well represented in the trends Google reports on searches. It might be interesting to compare those trends from Bing for example. My reasoning is that Google has a vested interest in surfacing G+ results and they don't have the same interest in surfacing Twitter results. I can be completely wrong here, let me know that by telling me why my reasoning is flawed or why my premise is flawed.
- mikeevans 14y ago
  There's sort of a post API "available" (It's in developer preview): https://developers.google.com/+/history/ https://developers.google.com/+/history/ Basically an app can add stuff to a private queue, and then a user can go in and then approve to share them.
richardkeller 14y ago
Correlation != Causation. Fewer people searching for "Google Plus" as a search term may in fact mean the exact opposite to what you're suggesting: the service may have become popular enough that people know how to get to it without requiring a search. Certainly, for anyone who uses Google as a search engine, the "+You" link is only one click away. Edit: Taking a closer look at the trends link you provided, the bulk of the traffic relating to Google Plus occurred in the first 3 months of it being announced, after which traffic has remained fairly constant. This suggests that the initial peak was an initial surge of people searching for "Google Plus" to try and find out more about it. It's easy to try and gleam meaning from the search data, but you need to be careful in the interpretation. On the other hand, it's curious to note that "Facebook" has maintained an order of magnitude higher search traffic than "Google Plus", despite Facebook being globally well-known.
- arturadib 14y ago
  The same can be said about Twitter, so the comparison is fair and the fact that their trends are opposite remains meaningful.
- alexlitov 14y ago
  Google Trends for G+, Twitter, Facebook http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twitter,+facebook&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit...
  - bad_user 14y ago
    That comparisson isn't fair as Facebook/Twitter are also the names of the corresponding companies and Facebook just went through a rough IPO (not to mention all the privacy issues people keep complaining about). For apples to apples, this is the graph you should be looking at: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=Google,+Facebook,+Twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=2 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=Google,+Facebook,+Twitter&#3... Also add the fact that many go to FB by searching it on Google, which pollutes those results.
camiller 14y ago
My G+ feed is noisy as hell. But I have a crapload of people with similar interests circled. Hundred of homebrewers and beer geeks in general. Another circle of photographers.
roc 14y ago
> "To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet." But isn't that an advertised feature of google+? That you could 'friend' people, but then toss them in a [siberia] circle to keep their noise from cluttering up your feed? And similarly keep posts about your drinking vacation from being 'blabbed' to all your professional contacts? It seems entirely possible that swaths of the social graph may have cut themselves off by pruning their circles down to the point that they were sharing to people who weren't listening to them and listening to people who weren't sharing with them. Consider: When that co-worker from three jobs ago asks "does anyone ever use google+?" Would you really say "dude, I'm on there all the time. I've just got you in [siberia]"? It seems to me that most people would downplay whether/how often they use it.
kevinw 14y ago
I definitely agree with this sentiment. I work at a technology-focused software startup, and while we all have Google Plus accounts, it isn't a service that most of us use regularly. Given the fact that I've never even been "added to a circle" by someone who isn't part of a technology-focused university or company, it seems less likely that there are legitimate and massive (400M!) pockets of users floating around anywhere remotely close to my circle of acquaintances. That said, I'm on the US East Coast, so I could easily have a biased viewpoint. Perhaps all the Google+ users are elsewhere in the world? Or perhaps the little Google+ notification bar at the top-right of the default Gmail interface counts as an impression for the purposes of this study?

redwood 14y ago

Active probably means one active use of a Google+ umbrella property (e.g. hangouts, youtube, etc)

tonfa 14y ago
According to the original plus post from Vic Gundotra, it means active use of mobile app or plus.google.com.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Be very careful of this one: "To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet." There is an interesting thing about G+ which hasn't "seeped in" to a lot of users, is that 'share with my circles' doesn't share with people who are following you but you don't have in your circles. To hit those people you need to share to 'public' (and yes there should be a share to followers which is less broad than public but that is only my opinion) Consequently you don't get as much 'fire hose' effect as you do on say twitter. And the APIs that post to Google+ are still not available as far as I can tell (pls correct if this is mistaken!) and a lot of my Facebook feed is not real news so much as auto-generated stuff from other apps. My point being that 'seeing it as quiet' isn't a good measure of anything. Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured out what G+ is, why search for it? And Google includes your G+ stuff in your search results (much to the dismay of many). I suspect the better proxy is going to find referrals from links in a G+ post. How many links are sharing, how many links are being followed, how much traffic does it drive. That will be a better measure of its success I expect.

arturadib 14y ago
> Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured out what G+ is, why search for it? Same applies to Twitter, so the comparison is fair.
- ok_craig 14y ago
  I think that what he means is, if you're on G+ and you go to Google, there's already a link to your G+ profile at the top for you. You just click it, instead of searching. And then if you want to find something specific maybe you do the search in G+.
  - arturadib 14y ago
    If we're going to include external links we should also remember that Twitter is built into iOS, so it's stats are also severely underrepresented. Yet their Google Trends curves are going in opposite directions...
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I'm not arguing that it is a wrong comparison, I'm arguing that it is different. My claim is that Google works hard to make sure you see Google+ results regardless so explicitly searching for them is not well represented in the trends Google reports on searches. It might be interesting to compare those trends from Bing for example. My reasoning is that Google has a vested interest in surfacing G+ results and they don't have the same interest in surfacing Twitter results. I can be completely wrong here, let me know that by telling me why my reasoning is flawed or why my premise is flawed.
mikeevans 14y ago
There's sort of a post API "available" (It's in developer preview): https://developers.google.com/+/history/ https://developers.google.com/+/history/ Basically an app can add stuff to a private queue, and then a user can go in and then approve to share them.

richardkeller 14y ago

Correlation != Causation. Fewer people searching for "Google Plus" as a search term may in fact mean the exact opposite to what you're suggesting: the service may have become popular enough that people know how to get to it without requiring a search. Certainly, for anyone who uses Google as a search engine, the "+You" link is only one click away. Edit: Taking a closer look at the trends link you provided, the bulk of the traffic relating to Google Plus occurred in the first 3 months of it being announced, after which traffic has remained fairly constant. This suggests that the initial peak was an initial surge of people searching for "Google Plus" to try and find out more about it. It's easy to try and gleam meaning from the search data, but you need to be careful in the interpretation. On the other hand, it's curious to note that "Facebook" has maintained an order of magnitude higher search traffic than "Google Plus", despite Facebook being globally well-known.

arturadib 14y ago
The same can be said about Twitter, so the comparison is fair and the fact that their trends are opposite remains meaningful.
alexlitov 14y ago
Google Trends for G+, Twitter, Facebook http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twitter,+facebook&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit...
- bad_user 14y ago
  That comparisson isn't fair as Facebook/Twitter are also the names of the corresponding companies and Facebook just went through a rough IPO (not to mention all the privacy issues people keep complaining about). For apples to apples, this is the graph you should be looking at: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=Google,+Facebook,+Twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=2 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=Google,+Facebook,+Twitter&#3... Also add the fact that many go to FB by searching it on Google, which pollutes those results.

camiller 14y ago

My G+ feed is noisy as hell. But I have a crapload of people with similar interests circled. Hundred of homebrewers and beer geeks in general. Another circle of photographers.

roc 14y ago

> "To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet." But isn't that an advertised feature of google+? That you could 'friend' people, but then toss them in a [siberia] circle to keep their noise from cluttering up your feed? And similarly keep posts about your drinking vacation from being 'blabbed' to all your professional contacts? It seems entirely possible that swaths of the social graph may have cut themselves off by pruning their circles down to the point that they were sharing to people who weren't listening to them and listening to people who weren't sharing with them. Consider: When that co-worker from three jobs ago asks "does anyone ever use google+?" Would you really say "dude, I'm on there all the time. I've just got you in [siberia]"? It seems to me that most people would downplay whether/how often they use it.

kevinw 14y ago

I definitely agree with this sentiment. I work at a technology-focused software startup, and while we all have Google Plus accounts, it isn't a service that most of us use regularly. Given the fact that I've never even been "added to a circle" by someone who isn't part of a technology-focused university or company, it seems less likely that there are legitimate and massive (400M!) pockets of users floating around anywhere remotely close to my circle of acquaintances. That said, I'm on the US East Coast, so I could easily have a biased viewpoint. Perhaps all the Google+ users are elsewhere in the world? Or perhaps the little Google+ notification bar at the top-right of the default Gmail interface counts as an impression for the purposes of this study?