Google+ Growing As a Social Backbone 267
OverTheGeicoE writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google+ has added 20 million users in just 3 weeks. According to the article, no other site has recorded such high growth in such a short time period. Twitter did something similar once, but in months, not weeks. It's especially surprising considering that access to Google+ is by invitation only. Why is Google+ growing so quickly?"
A recent article at O'Reilly Radar offers a possible answer to this, calling Google+ "the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone," but one that requires openness from Google to really flourish and supplant Facebook. The growth of Google+ will be helped by their acquisition of Fridge, a startup company focused on group sharing. Meanwhile, recruiters and marketers are already eyeballing the growing social network and licking their chops.
"Why is Google+ growing so quickly?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still need another 80m users (Score:5, Insightful)
The first numbers were around 88% male, then down to 67% male (http://mashable.com/2011/07/16/google-plus-female/)(http://www.businessinsider.com/debunked-3-viral-google-myths-2011-7), and now around 57% male (http://mashable.com/2011/07/20/google-plus-stats/). So, no, it's not a sausage fest. I wouldn't expect the numbers to get much more balanced until the casual games start arriving.
why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is Google+ growing so quickly?
Because it's not Facebook...
Re:"Why is Google+ growing so quickly?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe. Given that they had to shut down invites for a while, I don't think that's much of a draw. Google makes cool stuff, and they already have all of your email contacts (you have at least one google account, like the rest of the civilized world, right?), so they've got an actual chance to get enough people to hit critical mass. When they turn on apps access, it will open the next set of floodgates.
And, lets face it, Google+ is shiny to geeks and muggles alike - and shiny is the demographic for social networking.
Re:Tired and Flawed Reasoning (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sick of people proffering this and only this as a reason to Google+ growth. There is something more to it, after all, iTunes Ping [wikipedia.org] isn't Facebook either. Why didn't they balloon up to 20 million in two weeks?
They didn't have massive coverage in global internet searches and services to leverage from?
Re:I'll use it the same way I use other social sit (Score:4, Insightful)
When he does have parties, I bet they're vastly more interesting than the "let's invite everyone we've ever seen" parties.
Re:since when (Score:3, Insightful)
I love this about the comments on slashdot. Rewind 2 months and comments look like this:
Now, after Google+ is introduced, I have seen numerous quotes like this:
Please don't mistake me for defending Facebook or ragging on Google+, but some consistency would be nice...
This could be a very bad thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is probably one of the few sites I'll find more than a handful of those that hold my views, but I consider "Social Media" today a worrisome development. When I was a young fellow dialing in on a 9600 baud modem, using BBSes and cavorting around on the nascent Net, privacy was one of the main appeals. I loved having a separate life, anonymous on the internet and this appreciation continues to this day. I'm RanceJustice here and a few other places, but I'm also a dozen different aliases and handles as it suits me. It seems completely counterproductive to merge meatspace in its entirety with the digital world, much less do so via a medium that basically treats me as the product selling anything it knows about me. However, I do try to keep aware of these things and look for benefits, lest I miss something useful and new - I have no intention to be the old man yelling that I don't need email because writing letters is good enough....
I haven't really found any benefits though, for the most part. I enjoy forums immensely and I generally consider any website that is based upon user-submitted or created content is typically some form of a forum. Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Yelp, and others basically fall into this category, besides "the chans", and hobby-specific forums like World of Warcraft. Just like with "normal" blogging, I can see the value in microblogging services...for a very small amount of uses. Its a good way to broadcast information that others wish to see - if you're in the middle of Oslo today, its probably great to be able to send a tweet letting friends and family know you're safe and with pics or video of the carnage, location aware so that someone can get an ambulance to the right place. However, 90% of microblogging content seems to be useless, self-indulgent "Orange juice is yummy" "I am taking a shit", way to spew your thoughts onto the internet. Retweets and references become a game of tag and serve to make less content look like more, and there's the continual drive to acquire more followers. There isn't room to espouse deep concepts and explain them properly, so people tend to just put out what's on their mind. I have an Identi.ca (StatusNet is superior and open source compared to Twitter. I'm glad sites like Identi.ca exist) account, but is pretty much unused because I have a mental filter that says "If all my friends were in a room together, would it be important enough to say?" or "If I was standing in the crosswalk of a major city, would it be beneficial to shout it to strangers?", and the vast majority of the time the answer is no. Now, maybe this is just because I'm a private person overall and most of my friends don't live close enough to me that any location-dependent tweets would be worthwhile (ie. 50% off otoro box lunches at Japanese restaurant today only!), but I believe I have a filter where others do not that doesn't want to chatter inanely to the whole world in SMS-sized bites.
Finally we come to true "Social Media/Social Networks" like friendster, orkut, makeoutclub, MySpace, and the dreaded Facebook. While all the previous things, even Twitter, can be done via alias these seem to be set up to merge your entire real world life with the virtual and that is a bloody appalling prospect to me. Facebook seems the worst of all, but it has almost become a way of life in America where it is integrated into everything. Every "news" network and just about every form of entertainment has some link to it and it is becoming a disease. Take for instance the Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood game, where there is an item that you can only unlock in said game if you go on facebook, friend the developers/publishers and play their Facebook game. You're supposed to interact with everything, and of course, there's always something watching. Activision wants you to link your Battle.Net account to Facebook and you can set up World of Warcraft to announce on Facebook and Twitter whenever you achieve something in game - adding to their exposure of course. Many c