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This has been explained before. Google+ numbers can be misleading because they're tied to other services. The article mentions this: "The reasons behind Google

by vor_ 13y ago

This has been explained before. Google+ numbers can be misleading because they're tied to other services. The article mentions this: "The reasons behind Google Plus's growth -- it now can boast 359 million active users, up 33 percent from 269 million users at the end of June 2012, according to GlobalWebIndex -- are complex and tied to Google's effort to build a connecting layer across all its services, including search, YouTube, maps and other products. Log into one, and you've logged into the lot."

adventured 13y ago
And Twitter's numbers are extraordinarily misleading, because so many of their accounts are fake, and so many people just sign up but never really use the service.
- fizx 13y ago
  The numbers you see externally are the same as the ones used internally to reason about growth, and a great deal of care has been taken to keep them accurate. Fake accounts are culled, and inactives or likely spammers aren't counted in the numbers.
  - adventured 13y ago
    Fake accounts are culled? Apparently not very well. To take one simple example, half of Bieber's followers are fake. I'd be willing to bet that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all followers on public accounts are fake. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058 Then on top of this, I'd like to see how many Twitter users post a few Tweets and then give up. It's not hard to calculate that data just by sampling a large number of users from the API. I'd argue it's an extreme portion of the supposedly active user base. Mostly Twitter is shallow (as in limited use and interaction) consumption platform, with relatively few highly active producers.
    - cantankerous 13y ago
      I think he meant that fake accounts were culled from the count, not in general.
      - ampersandy 13y ago
        Semi-correct. Falsely identifying real users as spammers when computing metrics isn't a big deal, but it is a big deal if you are suspending accounts. Twitter does remove spammy accounts, but it's a slippery slope and I'm glad they remain cautious when it comes to suspending users.
        cantankerous 13y ago
        Makes sense. Thanks for the correction!
  - xtrumanx 13y ago
    By the way, here's a possible reason why you may have inactive accounts that you should be able to easily solve. I signed up for Twitter around January and frankly speaking, couldn't find my way around. I've heard people speak of retweets, DMs, hash tags and variety of other terminology and didn't seem to find an explanation of what they all meant or did after I signed up. In fact, I really didn't know what to do and just logged off and didn't bother with Twitter again until a couple of months later when I thought of trying to find and meet up with other coders in my city and thought perhaps Twitter might be a way useful way to accomplish that task. I found if I search for #[MyCity], there were a bunch of tweets with #[MyCity] so made a tweet along the lines of "Any coders in #[MyCity]? Let's meet." 8 hours later, I search #[MyCity] and my tweet wasn't even in the list. I asked on /r/Twitter and was told tweets from new accounts don't make it in the search results as to suppress spam. As a guy who doesn't know anyone on Twitter and who nobody knows on Twitter I feel like the service simply is unusable. The impression I'm left with is that Twitter is only useful for "brands". As a regular schmo who isn't a "brand", I don't see the point of using Twitter and thus my account is inactive.
notatoad 13y ago
it's been explained, but does it matter? Google+ has been referred to by google as a unified social layer spanning all their products. it's not just the part that looks like facebook that not many people seem to use. I very much doubt that google cares if you use their product or facebook or twitter to share what you had for breakfast this morning: being able to keep up with your friends is what social networks give you in exchange for you informing them of your social connections. The value for google is the user account you create and the social interaction graph data they collect across all their services. a comment made through your google+ account on your friend's youtube video or blogger blog is just as valuable as a comment left on their google+ page. it's the interaction that matters.

by vor_ 13y ago

adventured 13y ago

And Twitter's numbers are extraordinarily misleading, because so many of their accounts are fake, and so many people just sign up but never really use the service.

fizx 13y ago
The numbers you see externally are the same as the ones used internally to reason about growth, and a great deal of care has been taken to keep them accurate. Fake accounts are culled, and inactives or likely spammers aren't counted in the numbers.
- adventured 13y ago
  Fake accounts are culled? Apparently not very well. To take one simple example, half of Bieber's followers are fake. I'd be willing to bet that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all followers on public accounts are fake. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058 Then on top of this, I'd like to see how many Twitter users post a few Tweets and then give up. It's not hard to calculate that data just by sampling a large number of users from the API. I'd argue it's an extreme portion of the supposedly active user base. Mostly Twitter is shallow (as in limited use and interaction) consumption platform, with relatively few highly active producers.
  - cantankerous 13y ago
    I think he meant that fake accounts were culled from the count, not in general.
    - ampersandy 13y ago
      Semi-correct. Falsely identifying real users as spammers when computing metrics isn't a big deal, but it is a big deal if you are suspending accounts. Twitter does remove spammy accounts, but it's a slippery slope and I'm glad they remain cautious when it comes to suspending users.
      - cantankerous 13y ago
        Makes sense. Thanks for the correction!
- xtrumanx 13y ago
  By the way, here's a possible reason why you may have inactive accounts that you should be able to easily solve. I signed up for Twitter around January and frankly speaking, couldn't find my way around. I've heard people speak of retweets, DMs, hash tags and variety of other terminology and didn't seem to find an explanation of what they all meant or did after I signed up. In fact, I really didn't know what to do and just logged off and didn't bother with Twitter again until a couple of months later when I thought of trying to find and meet up with other coders in my city and thought perhaps Twitter might be a way useful way to accomplish that task. I found if I search for #[MyCity], there were a bunch of tweets with #[MyCity] so made a tweet along the lines of "Any coders in #[MyCity]? Let's meet." 8 hours later, I search #[MyCity] and my tweet wasn't even in the list. I asked on /r/Twitter and was told tweets from new accounts don't make it in the search results as to suppress spam. As a guy who doesn't know anyone on Twitter and who nobody knows on Twitter I feel like the service simply is unusable. The impression I'm left with is that Twitter is only useful for "brands". As a regular schmo who isn't a "brand", I don't see the point of using Twitter and thus my account is inactive.

notatoad 13y ago

it's been explained, but does it matter? Google+ has been referred to by google as a unified social layer spanning all their products. it's not just the part that looks like facebook that not many people seem to use. I very much doubt that google cares if you use their product or facebook or twitter to share what you had for breakfast this morning: being able to keep up with your friends is what social networks give you in exchange for you informing them of your social connections. The value for google is the user account you create and the social interaction graph data they collect across all their services. a comment made through your google+ account on your friend's youtube video or blogger blog is just as valuable as a comment left on their google+ page. it's the interaction that matters.