10 ms·

Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed

146 points by kercker 14y ago

salimmadjd 14y ago
Google+ has a very low engagement, even looking at Neilsen's 2012 data. I stopped using it a long ago, with the exception of the alerts I get on gmail which is probably the number google is using. I feel they should have stayed exclusive far longer, but that opportunity is long gone now.
- wyclif 14y ago
  Nope, sorry. 135 million active users cannot be considered "low engagement" by any metric out there, even by Neilsen.
  - salimmadjd 14y ago
    Engagement is different than active users. I can click the red button on my gmail account once a month and be considered active. Engagement is how much time I spend on the site. I'm on HN everyday commenting and reading. That's engagement, but I'm never on G+
    - wyclif 14y ago
      Sounds like classic extrapolating from personal use to me. "I'm never on G+" doesn't have anything to do with how many engaged, active users they have, and they have a lot.
      - salimmadjd 14y ago
        Not really. I have like 8000 followers. I'm basing it on observing their activity as well as mine.
masnick 14y ago
I wonder how they calculate active uses. I check Google+ maybe once a month...am I counted in there? I wish these statistics were reported in user-hours/month or some other unit that provided real information. I suspect this wouldn't look good for Google though.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Yes, but Facebook counts it the same way. If you like something once a month, you're an active user.
fleitz 14y ago
Which would be great if checking a feed meant more than logging into your gmail. Also it would be super if it were still 2006 and the only way to sign up was a .edu account. Since it's 2012 and most of the activity is driven by Gmail I'd say it's a glacial pace. When your marketing tools are the frontdoor of the internet as well as everyone's INBOX, and you're outdone by 11 guys with an iPhone only photosharing app, you know you're doing something wrong. It's a service so bad you can't even be forced to use it. It's as pathetic as MSN.com not being the front page of the internet despite 90% of computers defaulting to it.
- onedev 14y ago
  Ouch
- ajross 14y ago
  I guess. I check it every day. It's true that G+ is driven more by "interest communities" than by "friends and family links". Most of my activity there is reading and occasionally commenting on the posts of people more famous than I. So I think it's fair to say it hasn't achieved Facebook's level of success. Nor, perhaps, will it any time soon. But again, I check it every day, which is the same thing I do with Facebook. If you want my eyeballs for an ad, either platform provides the same value. I'm probably not typical, but I'm not completely weird either. I think you can only look at G+ as a success at this point. Just not a success on the scale of Google Search or Facebook.
  - creativityland 14y ago
    Most people I see on G+ when I approach them and ask in person did not even know they had a G+ account... but guess what, they did have a Google Account for Youtube and Gmail. You can see more and more G+ integration into Youtube, why not just turn Youtube into G+ altogether?
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      Have you seen the new version? It's practically a G+ skin for YouTube.
redwood 14y ago
Ridiculous to compare usage numbers between the two considering Facebook at that point (e.g. when they were at 100mil users) had no dominant products that its users were using every day. In other words when Facebook users went to Facebook, they really meant to. With G+, the monthly stats are meaningless since they're probably representative of Gmail logins who accidentally click on +.
- mkhpalm 14y ago
  Doubt it, thats easily traceable if that were the case. More than likely its due to things like Google Play and Android devices outpacing iOS devices. Plus a little Facebook kickback sprinkled in due to recent privacy and advertising changes.
- fl3tch 14y ago
  G+ has 135 million "stream active" users. Those are people who really meant to go to plus.google.com, not click something in Gmail.
  - shadowmint 14y ago
    Citation needed.
    - lchang 14y ago
      The first sentence in the article.
      - shadowmint 14y ago
        Right. "135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month". And what, we guess that Google is using the Facebook definition? https://www.facebook.com/help/219375581424410/ https://www.facebook.com/help/219375581424410/ Which means... unique user page views with 0 engagement metrics! Yay~ MAU and DAU are meaningless statistics. It's pure eye-views, that's all. Show me some average aggregate visits per user per month, and I'll believe there's actually something happening (ie. the average number of times each unique user visited the site in a single month. Hint: for Facebook, this number is probably ~20-30).
10098 14y ago
The only problem with g+ is that none of my friends use it. Personally I'd choose g+ over facebook's shitty interface and quality any day.
- bratsche 14y ago
  I pop into Google+ occasionally, but I usually regret it. They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit. At my undergrad school we had some preacher who used to hang out at a certain spot in the middle of campus and yell at passing students to tell them what sinners they are. Google+'s "what's hot and popular" often feels like the Internet's version of that spot, except it's for those whose religion is based on smartphones. I definitely agree about the interface. Google+ has a beautiful interface for viewing these types of posts. Facebook's interface seems to be a little too optimized for viewing George Takei posts for my taste.
  - gurkendoktor 14y ago
    > just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck Two anecdotes still don't make a a solid point, but this is what made me exclude "popular postings" from my feed. Twitter, which has a similar focus on following celebrities instead of people you know, suffers from the same problem...the top tweets on (German) Twitter sound terribly typical of things that Twitter users would say. I think networks should curate these "highlights" a lot more wisely.
  - haakon 14y ago
    > They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit. At least for me, these posts have gradually changed into embarassing images with trifles about friendship and love, as well as images with pseudoscientific and borderline superstitious claims about health etc. This "facebookification" has lead me to believe that Google+ is now really taking off. Honestly I'd rather have the kneejerk tech rants back.
polarix 14y ago
This information could be nicely replaced by a comparison graph, similar to what you would expect when comparing the runs of two stocks over time.
- martinced 14y ago
  Make that "comparison graphs". Show how many people use FB email, how many people use FB as a Web search engine, how many people use FB to edit office documents, how many people use the browser created by FB ; ) , etc. Google+ seems to be, albeit slowly, achieving escape velocity. My G+ feed is definitely getting more and more interesting and I begin to see non-techies post there (people who previously only used FB). 135 millions active users vs 1 billion is not something to dismiss, especially seen the rest of their entire stack.
bigiain 14y ago
I wonder how much this is because Google is pulling some "hang on, didn't you guys used to be the 'don't be evil' company" shit like this: http://sfappeal.com/news/2012/12/google-adds-bizarre-requirement-for-sfpds-bike-theft-workshop-attendees.php http://sfappeal.com/news/2012/12/google-adds-bizarre-require... A community event organized by the city, with speakers from the local police department, "helpfully" hosted by Google, who then, without asking or even telling the organizers and promoters, append some self-serving bullshit attendance requirements: "According to the RSVP page for the event, admission to the bicycle theft event is guaranteed only if community members include a link to their Google Plus Local profile with five or more reviews." and: 'None of the San Francisco city officials who organized the event, it seems, knew about the marketing language Google inserted on the RSVP page. "You know you try and do something good, you try and do something for the community and something like this happens," Officer Carlos Manfredi, an SFPD spokesperson told The Appeal in apparent frustration.' The SFPD believed the workshop was open to members of the community, and everyone in the community was able to attend. "That's what the flyer said," Manfredi said." Stay classy Google...
michaelochurch 14y ago
These are meaningless numbers, for reasons already given in this thread, but Google+ is a good product. In fact, I remember in June 2011 how, after it launched, there was a lot of press about how great it was. That applause was well-earned, in my opinion. The engineers who built it did a very good job, and the problems that Google+ has faced have been strategic in nature. On the other hand, Google+ needed, strategically, to get real use, and so far it hasn't been seeing much of that. Hangouts are useful, but the idea that people would use them as Google intended (as a "cool" emergent social behavior rather than something people would only do with people they know well) was hopeless without a context (such as a board game, a great tool for overcoming the initial social awkwardness that is common among interesting people) that could encourage the "hanging out". Without such a context squarely in the center, people won't use hangouts for more free-form purposes than "regular old" video chat. It's an admirable vision, though. This is why, in my short time at Google, I was obsessed with raising the issue of game quality, even though I was nowhere near that team (there was zero G+ activity in New York). I realized that Games had the potential to be a critical battle for the product's ability to establish itself and get users comfortable with product. With social network fatigue in an advanced state ca. 2011, the only thing that could get people in a new general-purpose social network for long enough to get comfortable with the thing was high-quality games (not Zynga shit). Google blew it on that one, resulting in a missed opportunity that can be measured in the tens to hundreds of millions, and possibly billions. Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos). It was that, and the fact that, when the shit hit the fan, I did some white-hat trolling and outed unethical management (eng-misc) instead of just taking it.
- untog 14y ago
  If people at Google still know of you I strongly suspect it is because they have read one of your posts here. No offense intended, but this is far from the first time I have read a post by you detailing how you were kicked out of Google for what you claim to be speaking truth to power. It detracts from the very valid points you made earlier in your post.
nate_martin 14y ago
I'd really like to know exactly how much time the average user spends on G+ per month in comparison to Facebook. The only reason I ever go on it is to see what Linus has posted.
caycep 14y ago
and this compares with ludicrous speed how?
killermonkeys 14y ago
Facebook has a significant fraction of the world Internet population (about 41%). Google has far less (about 6%?). Growing as fast as Facebook is great (better than growing more slowly) but the marginal effort to acquire a user is much higher for Facebook than for Google. You can't compare the growth rate of Google+ to Facebook any more than you can compare Google's growth rate to Bing.
- graue 14y ago
  Read the article again. It's comparing Plus's growth rate to that of Facebook when Facebook had the same number of users (~100mil).
hobbyist 14y ago
I read a meme some time back which asked, what is something that everyone has but rarely use it? Answer: google+
- seoguru 14y ago
  Lots of people use it a lot, here are 4 interesting streams, note the number of comments for posts: https://plus.google.com/+nicolesy/posts https://plus.google.com/+nicolesy/posts https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts https://plus.google.com/117176908342196183611/posts https://plus.google.com/117176908342196183611/posts https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MikeElgan/posts https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MikeElgan/posts Lots of g+ is hidden of course because people don't post everything publicly. I like g+ much better than facebook and wish my non geeky friends and family would come over to it.
  - taligent 14y ago
    Firstly, I HATE that UI. It's slow, clunky and cluttered. Secondly, you have deliberately some of the most popular people on Google+. In particular Guy Kawasaki. It's not representative of a typical user.
ErikAugust 14y ago
G+ is very pedestrian. There's no draw outside of Hangouts.
iamtherockstar 14y ago
I have my feed open a lot, but not because I'm reading it. It's because I opened the tab, clicked "Start a Hangout", and that Hangout window opened in a new window. The feed window is now hidden by the Hangout window, so the analytics might be skewed.
alayne 14y ago
When you see that many conditionals, there's usually marketing bullshit going on.
titoc 14y ago
I dont think G+ gives a personalised feel as FB .I will use FB as long as my friends are in FB. I feel G+ is more geek-ish.
shasta 14y ago
Here's what Google should have done instead of Google+. (As for the OP, Google+ is a ghost town. It doesn't matter much how often people pass through and see the tumbleweed blowing around if they're not staying and contributing.) First, they should not make people register for Google+. They shouldn't even call it Google+. It should just be a feature added to gmail: pages. You create gmail pages and you manage access to gmail pages. Access is not granted to other "Google+" accounts (there's no such thing), but to any set of email contacts. Access may also be made public, in which case a gmail page acts as a lightweight blog post (though you might require login to comment). That's it. Rather than sending a friend an invitation to Google+, you'd send a link to an interesting gmail page. If it's access controlled (not public), then when they click to retrieve it, if they don't have the cookie yet, they'd need to check their email and click the Google just sent. In many respects, it should function just like Google+ does now. Pages would have posts, pictures, comments, live chats, hang-outs, games, whatever. And once you're on a gmail page, you could browse up to the author's profile page and see whatever other pages they'd made visible to you. The major difference is that you could send content to anyone without the stupid "are you on Google+?" conversation that has to happen first now and thus can build pages without worrying too much about whether the ghost town will become a popular tourist destination.
- patrickaljord 14y ago
  That was Google Buzz, didn't work out to too well.
nitochi 14y ago
I think this responds to Facebook's continuous decline in service. They have messed up the algorithms so bad that News Feeds tend to be more static than ever before, back in the good days, people checked Facebook a hundred times a day because there was something new all the time. Today, if you check your Facebook 5 times during the day and you will probably get the same news as before. They also pissed all their page owners off with Edge Rank, which was rolled out too aggressively for my taste. Since not every facebook page owner is a facebook or SMM genius, a lot of small pages lost a lot of engagement, which turns into less engagement on the site overall (from users and page admins). I started using G+ a couple of months ago because of their Hangouts, but am gradually becoming more engaged on the site. Facebook will fall, and pretty soon I think. Too much spam, horrible filters and crappy customization on your share settings make it a shitty service now. As G+ emphasizes share settings control, I can see why it will take over pretty fast, they just need to gain a little more momentum.
- omarchowdhury 14y ago
  Plus, the only ads that seem to work for advertisers on Facebook are scams. All the other revenue is coming from companies who aren't measuring. But soon, they'll realize what a waste it is, and once they pull out CPC is going to dive. And if Facebook decides to artificially inflate CPC, fewer people who aren't running scams won't pay.
Evgeny 14y ago
The only reason I recently created the account on Google+ was to be able to 'author' my blog posts so that they appear nicely in Google search results (as described here, for example: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportanceOfRelmeAndRelauthorOnYourContentsSEOAndGoogle.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportance... ) But I'm sure they counted me ...
- WalterGR 14y ago
  The only reason I created an account was because they kept spamming me with "People you may know," and the only way to opt out of the spam was to... create a Google+ account.
- dspig 14y ago
  The only reason I created an account was because when following a link to an article on G+ it always asked for personal info, and cancelling that logged me out of Google Apps. Seems like they have a lot of different ways of persuading us to sign up!
erikpukinskis 14y ago
I wonder how many of those are, like me, people who accidentally switch to Google+ while trying to tap the tiny links atop other Google properties on their mobile phones.
xiaoma 14y ago
For me, the thing keeping me off of Google+ is that it's linked to my other accounts. Violations (or even suspected violations) of copyright and a long list of other things could get the entire account in trouble. I say this as someone who has received copyright notices on content I produced entirely on my own. I would never want to jeopardize my Gmail or Adsense. It's much better to get my social fix from any other company.
- bad_user 14y ago
  This is exactly how I feel. And it's not just about email either. I also use my Google Drive account. I also have a couple of purchases on Google Play. I had photos in Picasa at some point too. Google blocking your account means you lose access to all of this. Which is why using Blogger or Google+ is a liability.
  - Metapony 14y ago
    I feel this way too. I have a laptop I keep my gmail logged into, I don't want that tied into my android phone via google play. Google+ is just one more privacy intrusion.
jan_g 14y ago
I see a lot of bashing in this thread, but those numbers might actually be true, because of the explosion of Android on mobile phones. There's high probability that lots of activity comes from mobile users.
sytelus 14y ago
Interesting metric would be the number of people who posted at least one content item every month for past quarter. Here the content item = status/+1/like/comment/photo/URL. Write metric is more robust than read metric, especially against users who are simply using FB or G just to login into other sites or apps.
kryptiskt 14y ago
Nothing quite underscores Google's desperation like the "you can't view Google+ content if you're a logged-out Google user"-trick they pull. What the hell is the deal with that? Are the little check marks they can put in the Active Users column really worth the bad experience they are giving those same users who just wanted to read the post? Sure, it's a little niggle, nothing worth complaining about. The grating thing is that they went out of their way to create a roadblock, even casting aside the pretension that logged-out means something.
- tytso 14y ago
  If someone posts a URL to a G+ post, you can most certainly view it without being logged-in. (Try it: go to your G+ stream, and then for a post, select "Link to this post" on the drop-down menu, then past that into a Incognito window --- you'll be able to view the post.) You can also view a user's G+ profile, and view all of their public posts, without being logged in. Yes, you won't be able to create a stream and follow a set of users without creating a G+ account --- but without a G+ account, there's no place to actually store the set of users / G+ pages / G+ communities that you're interested in....
  - nwh 14y ago
    It's strange that I hear that from a lot of G+ users. I personally find that when I try to visit even links from HN pointing toward G+ posts, I am forced (well, prompted) to log in. For that reason alone I've never actually seen a post on google plus.
    - spot 14y ago
      prompted and forced are two different things.
      - nwh 14y ago
        It still refused to show me any content until I logged in. I was trying to imply that I refused to.
restlessdesign 14y ago
Nice try, Google.
quattrofan 14y ago
I've spent more time on G+ than FB for most of this year. I pretty much am once a week on FB and daily on G+.
martindale 14y ago
I wish we'd stop comparing Google+ to monolithic "social networks" as if it weren't exactly what the name implies, the next iteration on top of all of Google.
loceng 14y ago
I wonder how, or if, these metrics will be affected by their recent change of free business accounts; It's a gamble for Google, as it may take a few years for numbers to de-stabilize.
sdafdasdfasdf 14y ago
"Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month" I usually check mine accidentally, one every few weeks. I have an account and lots of circles that are populated, but I don't post on it or look at others posts unless someone points me to something which happens once every month or two. They should have stats on the number of hits G+ gets vs. FB. I know many of you use G+, but you are in a bubble. It isn't as big as FB and won't be anytime soon.

146 points by kercker 14y ago

Google+ has a very low engagement, even looking at Neilsen's 2012 data. I stopped using it a long ago, with the exception of the alerts I get on gmail which is probably the number google is using. I feel they should have stayed exclusive far longer, but that opportunity is long gone now.

wyclif 14y ago
Nope, sorry. 135 million active users cannot be considered "low engagement" by any metric out there, even by Neilsen.
- salimmadjd 14y ago
  Engagement is different than active users. I can click the red button on my gmail account once a month and be considered active. Engagement is how much time I spend on the site. I'm on HN everyday commenting and reading. That's engagement, but I'm never on G+
  - wyclif 14y ago
    Sounds like classic extrapolating from personal use to me. "I'm never on G+" doesn't have anything to do with how many engaged, active users they have, and they have a lot.
    - salimmadjd 14y ago
      Not really. I have like 8000 followers. I'm basing it on observing their activity as well as mine.

masnick 14y ago

I wonder how they calculate active uses. I check Google+ maybe once a month...am I counted in there? I wish these statistics were reported in user-hours/month or some other unit that provided real information. I suspect this wouldn't look good for Google though.

mtgx 14y ago
Yes, but Facebook counts it the same way. If you like something once a month, you're an active user.

fleitz 14y ago

Which would be great if checking a feed meant more than logging into your gmail. Also it would be super if it were still 2006 and the only way to sign up was a .edu account. Since it's 2012 and most of the activity is driven by Gmail I'd say it's a glacial pace. When your marketing tools are the frontdoor of the internet as well as everyone's INBOX, and you're outdone by 11 guys with an iPhone only photosharing app, you know you're doing something wrong. It's a service so bad you can't even be forced to use it. It's as pathetic as MSN.com not being the front page of the internet despite 90% of computers defaulting to it.

onedev 14y ago
Ouch
ajross 14y ago
I guess. I check it every day. It's true that G+ is driven more by "interest communities" than by "friends and family links". Most of my activity there is reading and occasionally commenting on the posts of people more famous than I. So I think it's fair to say it hasn't achieved Facebook's level of success. Nor, perhaps, will it any time soon. But again, I check it every day, which is the same thing I do with Facebook. If you want my eyeballs for an ad, either platform provides the same value. I'm probably not typical, but I'm not completely weird either. I think you can only look at G+ as a success at this point. Just not a success on the scale of Google Search or Facebook.
- creativityland 14y ago
  Most people I see on G+ when I approach them and ask in person did not even know they had a G+ account... but guess what, they did have a Google Account for Youtube and Gmail. You can see more and more G+ integration into Youtube, why not just turn Youtube into G+ altogether?
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    Have you seen the new version? It's practically a G+ skin for YouTube.

redwood 14y ago

Ridiculous to compare usage numbers between the two considering Facebook at that point (e.g. when they were at 100mil users) had no dominant products that its users were using every day. In other words when Facebook users went to Facebook, they really meant to. With G+, the monthly stats are meaningless since they're probably representative of Gmail logins who accidentally click on +.

mkhpalm 14y ago
Doubt it, thats easily traceable if that were the case. More than likely its due to things like Google Play and Android devices outpacing iOS devices. Plus a little Facebook kickback sprinkled in due to recent privacy and advertising changes.
fl3tch 14y ago
G+ has 135 million "stream active" users. Those are people who really meant to go to plus.google.com, not click something in Gmail.
- shadowmint 14y ago
  Citation needed.
  - lchang 14y ago
    The first sentence in the article.
    - shadowmint 14y ago
      Right. "135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month". And what, we guess that Google is using the Facebook definition? https://www.facebook.com/help/219375581424410/ https://www.facebook.com/help/219375581424410/ Which means... unique user page views with 0 engagement metrics! Yay~ MAU and DAU are meaningless statistics. It's pure eye-views, that's all. Show me some average aggregate visits per user per month, and I'll believe there's actually something happening (ie. the average number of times each unique user visited the site in a single month. Hint: for Facebook, this number is probably ~20-30).

10098 14y ago

The only problem with g+ is that none of my friends use it. Personally I'd choose g+ over facebook's shitty interface and quality any day.

bratsche 14y ago
I pop into Google+ occasionally, but I usually regret it. They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit. At my undergrad school we had some preacher who used to hang out at a certain spot in the middle of campus and yell at passing students to tell them what sinners they are. Google+'s "what's hot and popular" often feels like the Internet's version of that spot, except it's for those whose religion is based on smartphones. I definitely agree about the interface. Google+ has a beautiful interface for viewing these types of posts. Facebook's interface seems to be a little too optimized for viewing George Takei posts for my taste.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  > just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck Two anecdotes still don't make a a solid point, but this is what made me exclude "popular postings" from my feed. Twitter, which has a similar focus on following celebrities instead of people you know, suffers from the same problem...the top tweets on (German) Twitter sound terribly typical of things that Twitter users would say. I think networks should curate these "highlights" a lot more wisely.
- haakon 14y ago
  > They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit. At least for me, these posts have gradually changed into embarassing images with trifles about friendship and love, as well as images with pseudoscientific and borderline superstitious claims about health etc. This "facebookification" has lead me to believe that Google+ is now really taking off. Honestly I'd rather have the kneejerk tech rants back.

polarix 14y ago

This information could be nicely replaced by a comparison graph, similar to what you would expect when comparing the runs of two stocks over time.

martinced 14y ago
Make that "comparison graphs". Show how many people use FB email, how many people use FB as a Web search engine, how many people use FB to edit office documents, how many people use the browser created by FB ; ) , etc. Google+ seems to be, albeit slowly, achieving escape velocity. My G+ feed is definitely getting more and more interesting and I begin to see non-techies post there (people who previously only used FB). 135 millions active users vs 1 billion is not something to dismiss, especially seen the rest of their entire stack.

bigiain 14y ago

I wonder how much this is because Google is pulling some "hang on, didn't you guys used to be the 'don't be evil' company" shit like this: http://sfappeal.com/news/2012/12/google-adds-bizarre-requirement-for-sfpds-bike-theft-workshop-attendees.php http://sfappeal.com/news/2012/12/google-adds-bizarre-require... A community event organized by the city, with speakers from the local police department, "helpfully" hosted by Google, who then, without asking or even telling the organizers and promoters, append some self-serving bullshit attendance requirements: "According to the RSVP page for the event, admission to the bicycle theft event is guaranteed only if community members include a link to their Google Plus Local profile with five or more reviews." and: 'None of the San Francisco city officials who organized the event, it seems, knew about the marketing language Google inserted on the RSVP page. "You know you try and do something good, you try and do something for the community and something like this happens," Officer Carlos Manfredi, an SFPD spokesperson told The Appeal in apparent frustration.' The SFPD believed the workshop was open to members of the community, and everyone in the community was able to attend. "That's what the flyer said," Manfredi said." Stay classy Google...

michaelochurch 14y ago

These are meaningless numbers, for reasons already given in this thread, but Google+ is a good product. In fact, I remember in June 2011 how, after it launched, there was a lot of press about how great it was. That applause was well-earned, in my opinion. The engineers who built it did a very good job, and the problems that Google+ has faced have been strategic in nature. On the other hand, Google+ needed, strategically, to get real use, and so far it hasn't been seeing much of that. Hangouts are useful, but the idea that people would use them as Google intended (as a "cool" emergent social behavior rather than something people would only do with people they know well) was hopeless without a context (such as a board game, a great tool for overcoming the initial social awkwardness that is common among interesting people) that could encourage the "hanging out". Without such a context squarely in the center, people won't use hangouts for more free-form purposes than "regular old" video chat. It's an admirable vision, though. This is why, in my short time at Google, I was obsessed with raising the issue of game quality, even though I was nowhere near that team (there was zero G+ activity in New York). I realized that Games had the potential to be a critical battle for the product's ability to establish itself and get users comfortable with product. With social network fatigue in an advanced state ca. 2011, the only thing that could get people in a new general-purpose social network for long enough to get comfortable with the thing was high-quality games (not Zynga shit). Google blew it on that one, resulting in a missed opportunity that can be measured in the tens to hundreds of millions, and possibly billions. Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos). It was that, and the fact that, when the shit hit the fan, I did some white-hat trolling and outed unethical management (eng-misc) instead of just taking it.

untog 14y ago
If people at Google still know of you I strongly suspect it is because they have read one of your posts here. No offense intended, but this is far from the first time I have read a post by you detailing how you were kicked out of Google for what you claim to be speaking truth to power. It detracts from the very valid points you made earlier in your post.

nate_martin 14y ago

I'd really like to know exactly how much time the average user spends on G+ per month in comparison to Facebook. The only reason I ever go on it is to see what Linus has posted.

caycep 14y ago

and this compares with ludicrous speed how?

killermonkeys 14y ago

Facebook has a significant fraction of the world Internet population (about 41%). Google has far less (about 6%?). Growing as fast as Facebook is great (better than growing more slowly) but the marginal effort to acquire a user is much higher for Facebook than for Google. You can't compare the growth rate of Google+ to Facebook any more than you can compare Google's growth rate to Bing.

graue 14y ago
Read the article again. It's comparing Plus's growth rate to that of Facebook when Facebook had the same number of users (~100mil).

hobbyist 14y ago

I read a meme some time back which asked, what is something that everyone has but rarely use it? Answer: google+

seoguru 14y ago
Lots of people use it a lot, here are 4 interesting streams, note the number of comments for posts: https://plus.google.com/+nicolesy/posts https://plus.google.com/+nicolesy/posts https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts https://plus.google.com/117176908342196183611/posts https://plus.google.com/117176908342196183611/posts https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MikeElgan/posts https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MikeElgan/posts Lots of g+ is hidden of course because people don't post everything publicly. I like g+ much better than facebook and wish my non geeky friends and family would come over to it.
- taligent 14y ago
  Firstly, I HATE that UI. It's slow, clunky and cluttered. Secondly, you have deliberately some of the most popular people on Google+. In particular Guy Kawasaki. It's not representative of a typical user.

ErikAugust 14y ago

G+ is very pedestrian. There's no draw outside of Hangouts.

iamtherockstar 14y ago

I have my feed open a lot, but not because I'm reading it. It's because I opened the tab, clicked "Start a Hangout", and that Hangout window opened in a new window. The feed window is now hidden by the Hangout window, so the analytics might be skewed.

alayne 14y ago

When you see that many conditionals, there's usually marketing bullshit going on.

titoc 14y ago

I dont think G+ gives a personalised feel as FB .I will use FB as long as my friends are in FB. I feel G+ is more geek-ish.

shasta 14y ago

Here's what Google should have done instead of Google+. (As for the OP, Google+ is a ghost town. It doesn't matter much how often people pass through and see the tumbleweed blowing around if they're not staying and contributing.) First, they should not make people register for Google+. They shouldn't even call it Google+. It should just be a feature added to gmail: pages. You create gmail pages and you manage access to gmail pages. Access is not granted to other "Google+" accounts (there's no such thing), but to any set of email contacts. Access may also be made public, in which case a gmail page acts as a lightweight blog post (though you might require login to comment). That's it. Rather than sending a friend an invitation to Google+, you'd send a link to an interesting gmail page. If it's access controlled (not public), then when they click to retrieve it, if they don't have the cookie yet, they'd need to check their email and click the Google just sent. In many respects, it should function just like Google+ does now. Pages would have posts, pictures, comments, live chats, hang-outs, games, whatever. And once you're on a gmail page, you could browse up to the author's profile page and see whatever other pages they'd made visible to you. The major difference is that you could send content to anyone without the stupid "are you on Google+?" conversation that has to happen first now and thus can build pages without worrying too much about whether the ghost town will become a popular tourist destination.

patrickaljord 14y ago
That was Google Buzz, didn't work out to too well.

nitochi 14y ago

I think this responds to Facebook's continuous decline in service. They have messed up the algorithms so bad that News Feeds tend to be more static than ever before, back in the good days, people checked Facebook a hundred times a day because there was something new all the time. Today, if you check your Facebook 5 times during the day and you will probably get the same news as before. They also pissed all their page owners off with Edge Rank, which was rolled out too aggressively for my taste. Since not every facebook page owner is a facebook or SMM genius, a lot of small pages lost a lot of engagement, which turns into less engagement on the site overall (from users and page admins). I started using G+ a couple of months ago because of their Hangouts, but am gradually becoming more engaged on the site. Facebook will fall, and pretty soon I think. Too much spam, horrible filters and crappy customization on your share settings make it a shitty service now. As G+ emphasizes share settings control, I can see why it will take over pretty fast, they just need to gain a little more momentum.

omarchowdhury 14y ago
Plus, the only ads that seem to work for advertisers on Facebook are scams. All the other revenue is coming from companies who aren't measuring. But soon, they'll realize what a waste it is, and once they pull out CPC is going to dive. And if Facebook decides to artificially inflate CPC, fewer people who aren't running scams won't pay.

Evgeny 14y ago

The only reason I recently created the account on Google+ was to be able to 'author' my blog posts so that they appear nicely in Google search results (as described here, for example: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportanceOfRelmeAndRelauthorOnYourContentsSEOAndGoogle.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportance... ) But I'm sure they counted me ...

WalterGR 14y ago
The only reason I created an account was because they kept spamming me with "People you may know," and the only way to opt out of the spam was to... create a Google+ account.
dspig 14y ago
The only reason I created an account was because when following a link to an article on G+ it always asked for personal info, and cancelling that logged me out of Google Apps. Seems like they have a lot of different ways of persuading us to sign up!

erikpukinskis 14y ago

I wonder how many of those are, like me, people who accidentally switch to Google+ while trying to tap the tiny links atop other Google properties on their mobile phones.

xiaoma 14y ago

For me, the thing keeping me off of Google+ is that it's linked to my other accounts. Violations (or even suspected violations) of copyright and a long list of other things could get the entire account in trouble. I say this as someone who has received copyright notices on content I produced entirely on my own. I would never want to jeopardize my Gmail or Adsense. It's much better to get my social fix from any other company.

bad_user 14y ago
This is exactly how I feel. And it's not just about email either. I also use my Google Drive account. I also have a couple of purchases on Google Play. I had photos in Picasa at some point too. Google blocking your account means you lose access to all of this. Which is why using Blogger or Google+ is a liability.
- Metapony 14y ago
  I feel this way too. I have a laptop I keep my gmail logged into, I don't want that tied into my android phone via google play. Google+ is just one more privacy intrusion.

jan_g 14y ago

I see a lot of bashing in this thread, but those numbers might actually be true, because of the explosion of Android on mobile phones. There's high probability that lots of activity comes from mobile users.

sytelus 14y ago

Interesting metric would be the number of people who posted at least one content item every month for past quarter. Here the content item = status/+1/like/comment/photo/URL. Write metric is more robust than read metric, especially against users who are simply using FB or G just to login into other sites or apps.

kryptiskt 14y ago

Nothing quite underscores Google's desperation like the "you can't view Google+ content if you're a logged-out Google user"-trick they pull. What the hell is the deal with that? Are the little check marks they can put in the Active Users column really worth the bad experience they are giving those same users who just wanted to read the post? Sure, it's a little niggle, nothing worth complaining about. The grating thing is that they went out of their way to create a roadblock, even casting aside the pretension that logged-out means something.

tytso 14y ago
If someone posts a URL to a G+ post, you can most certainly view it without being logged-in. (Try it: go to your G+ stream, and then for a post, select "Link to this post" on the drop-down menu, then past that into a Incognito window --- you'll be able to view the post.) You can also view a user's G+ profile, and view all of their public posts, without being logged in. Yes, you won't be able to create a stream and follow a set of users without creating a G+ account --- but without a G+ account, there's no place to actually store the set of users / G+ pages / G+ communities that you're interested in....
- nwh 14y ago
  It's strange that I hear that from a lot of G+ users. I personally find that when I try to visit even links from HN pointing toward G+ posts, I am forced (well, prompted) to log in. For that reason alone I've never actually seen a post on google plus.
  - spot 14y ago
    prompted and forced are two different things.
    - nwh 14y ago
      It still refused to show me any content until I logged in. I was trying to imply that I refused to.

restlessdesign 14y ago

Nice try, Google.

quattrofan 14y ago

I've spent more time on G+ than FB for most of this year. I pretty much am once a week on FB and daily on G+.

martindale 14y ago

I wish we'd stop comparing Google+ to monolithic "social networks" as if it weren't exactly what the name implies, the next iteration on top of all of Google.

loceng 14y ago

I wonder how, or if, these metrics will be affected by their recent change of free business accounts; It's a gamble for Google, as it may take a few years for numbers to de-stabilize.

sdafdasdfasdf 14y ago

"Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month" I usually check mine accidentally, one every few weeks. I have an account and lots of circles that are populated, but I don't post on it or look at others posts unless someone points me to something which happens once every month or two. They should have stats on the number of hits G+ gets vs. FB. I know many of you use G+, but you are in a bubble. It isn't as big as FB and won't be anytime soon.