Tracking Down How Many (Or How Few) People Actively Use Google+ 210
BarbaraHudson writes Business Insider is reporting that despite billions of sign-ups, almost nobody is publicly active on Google+. Analytics and visualization blogger Kevin Anderson studied data compiled by Edward Morbius, who says that just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post public content. "We've got a grand spanking total of 24 profiles out of 7,875 whose 2015 post activity isn't YouTube comments but Google+ posts. That a 0.3% rate of all profile pages, going back to our 2.2 billion profiles. No wonder Dave Besbris (Google+ boss) doesn't want to talk about numbers," Morbius writes. For those interested both his methodology and the scripts used can be found here.
Google Plus Defined Itself As a Hazard (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing shoved in your face that might volunteer your private information on YouTube or elsewhere should you click the wrong button.
Or the unwanted question when using Gmail.
After negative momentum, no one listens.
Re:Google Plus Defined Itself As a Hazard (Score:5, Interesting)
That's pretty much it. Google was being pretty hard core about their real name policy on Google+, to the degree that people who Google determined had violated it ended up having their entire Google collection of services canceled.
Since I *do* use lots of Google services, but don't really care about the social media part, I never signed up for Google+. I didn't want to take the chance of losing the services I did value.
By the time they finally saw sense and dropped the requirement, I didn't care enough to sign up.
Re:Google Plus Defined Itself As a Hazard (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
Google+ wasn't ever *just* a social network. It was a real-name, real-identity service tied to the entire universe of Google products.
This made Google+ decidedly dangerous for a vast majority of users who enjoy anonymity as one of the principal "features" of the web.
Google had an opportunity to create a fantastic service but their extremely weird philosophical tirade to bring identity to the web, coupled with an overly aggressive "whoops, you just created a Google+ ID and revealed your identity on 5000 YouTube comments" rightfully turned off millions of users.
They deserve this failure. Pursuing products that nobody wants, by ramming them down the throats of their existing customers, is a bad idea in any business.
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Well if Google finally manages to smarten up they will create a two level profile and public profile and a private profile. They can even go the popular Linux route where from the user perspective the private profile looks substantially different like the typical Linux root layout and the public profile with it's anonymising user name looks more social and interactive. Instead they made this idea as purposefully awkward as possible. So two linked but completely separate profiles a private and a public prof
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What does Facebook do? I don't really understand the hatred for G+ given that this policy has already been changed for some time now, and that facebook had a similar policy.
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If you want comments about what Facebook does, go to the story about Facebook. This is about 'G-' (that is far more appropriate). I went through all the rigmarole to delete and clear my Facebook profile many years ago and had to do so because even a never used one complains and demands to be monitored. So yeah, Facebook sucks big time for many reasons, now what exactly does that to do with 'G-' and the changes it needs to make to become more usable and popular and actually be 'G+' rather than 'G-' ;P.
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The profile delete process is also filled with scary language that makes it unclear whether you're deleting your whole Google account or just the Google+ profile. This is no mistake. It's more sneaky bullshit that seems to come more from the Microsoft camp than the Google camp. Google needs to be careful. Microsoft is hated by an enormous number of users. It's almost funny today to hear Microsoft executives try and figure out why nobody likes them. Sure, today you're being cool but the public has a l
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The privacy thing where websites constantly embed Google and Facebook references in their websites has really gotten out of hand.
This below is the MINIMUM that you need to set in your hosts file to at least prevent some of the snooping that's going on.
Yes, plus.google.com is one of them
0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com
0.0.0.0 googleadservices.com
0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com
0.0.0.0 plus.google.com
0.0.0.0 yt3.ggpht.com
0.0.0.0 doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0 google-public-dns-a.google.com
0.0.0.
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you sure you never signed on for google+ and use google services? because if you didn't, that's a feat!
thing is, with tech circles, everyone knew already the reason why google forced every youtuber basically to join google+, through deceit at the end.. I had managed to avoid creating a google+ account for a quite long time but one click on youtube to make a comment got me in the end..
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Don't forget, Google forced Google+ users to join Youtube. From my view, Youtube was the stinky cheese we didn't order with our meal. A lot of us joined Google+ without having even on other Google service linked to it.
Please stoop making Google+ your whipping boy when the fault is with "Google". If you hate Google+ but love Youtube, then maybe you're not seeing the common parent they both have?
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No, pretty sure that's a myth. The one person I heard about who did get obliterated from all google services, turned out to be an artist who had deliberately tried to push the boundaries for what constitutes child porn or not. That's the sort of thing they do to avoid complicity in crimes, not what they
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Really? I thought you were named René Boot and that was your Unix lusername.
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...The thing shoved in your face ...
That's basically the reason why I never really ramped up my google+ usage.
.
google was so rude about making me use google+ in areas where I did not want to use it, that I stopped using it altogether.
Now I notice that I cannot even reply to comments left on my youtube.com video channel, even though I am logged into my youtube.com account. I suspect the reason has something to do with the fact that I've all but abandoned my google+ account.
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I signed up voluntarily, and at the time there was little to no push to force unwanted services like gmail or youtube on us. That came later, so it's hard to say that's how its life started. Maybe it's how you heard of it but that's a different story.
And it pretty much is active there. I don't know what FB is like, probably never will, but it's certainly not dead. And I find troubling the idea that "9%" is equated to "almost nobody".
Sure, I'll admit that a lot of the updates are coming from reposts from
I dunno (Score:5, Interesting)
I dip in and out, occasionally posting pictures and responding to stories, but typically I don't produce on it, just consume. Mind you, besides slashdot, I don't really produce anywhere, so that's not really saying much. The news and links are good. I'd rather they allowed their topics / posts / etc.. to be absorbed through RSS or the such, and I have definitely seen Google recently stepping back from standards (Gtalk for instance) and regardless of the why's of the matter, I'm not sold on Google 'winning the war', but it is a nice place to discover information that I would've otherwise missed from other sources, or apathy.
Google+ has better communities... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I stopped using Facebook because it was making me strongly dislike people I have known for years. I found out they were deeply racist, or prejudiced against the poor, etc etc, and stopped wanting to talk to them.
I do post "normal stuff" there, but only if it is exceptional. I don't post everything I cook. The bar was lower on Facebook. Another reason to shine it on.
Sign ups (Score:3, Informative)
I like google+, but these figures aren't all that surprising. The signups really are people activating their smart phones, using gmail, signing into youtube or any other google service. Without knowing it they have created their google+ account but in reality have no interest in the service.
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Without knowing it they have created their google+ account but in reality have no interest in the service.
I have a google+ profile pretty much solely because they made it mandatory. Matter of fact, I have 2 profiles, neither of them ever 'used' to make so much as a post.
My feeds are pretty busy... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but almost all of the posts that hit it are private, posted by people who deliberately use G+ precisely because there's more plausible deniability about how active they are. It's anecdotal, but I've heard a lot of my G+ friends say that they've gone there either to avoid people they'd otherwise have to interact with on Facebook, or because circles are easy to use and they can pretend to be lurkers/have dead accounts there but they're really just not posting anything visible to you.
That said, I freely admit there are a ton of people not on G+. It seems to mostly be a hit with the 25-45 crowd, if my feeds there are any indication. Older people don't get it, and younger people seem to care more about Instagram than either Facebook or G+ at this point.
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Yes, I think only looking at public posts skews the results. The G+ customer is more likely to be there for the purpose of fine tuning their audience, both incoming and outgoing. I know that only maybe one in 10 of my posts is done as public. People who want to spray their thoughts and opinions at the widest possible audience gravitate toward... the widest possible audience!
If you want a bullhorn you go to Twitter, because that's not really what G+ is about. G+ is about friends and interest-communities, new
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older people DO get it. I'm one of them and I've avoided FB, twitter and all social media since they all started. I never gave in. I never will, either. we all know the best way to avoid the hassles is to never join in.
I do contribute to various tech forums, but I'm not sure I consider that 'social media' as they have a direct purpose (code or hardware or something that we all discuss and share info and insights on). the pure social bullshit sites offer me nothing of value and they never really did.
is
Unanswered question (Score:2)
Analytics and visualization blogger Kevin Anderson studied data compiled by Edward Morbius, who says that just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post public content.
And of that "just 9%"... how much was activity on other Google properties where you have to jump through hoops NOT to have it cross-posted to Google+?
I know they mentioned YouTube comments, but this was also an issue with YouTube videos. If you posted one on your channel, you had to take steps for it not to be crossposted to your Google+ page. And, of course, most people who post on YouTube were semi-forced to create a Google+ page simply to remove some artificial constraints Google added with the goal of a
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The phrasing is wierd, but I figure the .3% that are actually 'google posts' is an accurate number, and youtube crossposts were mentioned because they're the vast majority.
Of course, I was all irked when I wanted to comment on a youtube video and youtube wanted to act like I have a 'channel' with my own videos on it. No, I don't want or need a 'channel'. I'm not posting comment that's worth anything on it's own.
poisionous and risky name policy. (Score:5, Insightful)
i pointed this out before, but google's policy of forcing people to give their *real* names is incredibly dangerous. google set themselves up as the *authority* - the guarantor - that the person you are contacting is exactly whom google *says* they are. now, given that it's possible under gmail to register very similar email addresses (with and without "." in them) we have the potential extremely litigous situation where someone could be deceived and then sue google - rightly - for damages based on google's guarantees - safety about identity - not being properly upheld.
contrast that situation where *everyone knows* that you don't trust email. or any kind of unconfirmed interaction on the internet.
and i think this is what people felt - subconsciously - both inside google as well as outside, that there was something very very badly wrong about forcing people to both disclose but also to allow google to "certify" their identity.
the other thing is just that... google+ is... simply... devoid of excitement and interest. it feels like it's a single-track uninspiring place, with one direction that Thou Shalt Go: google's waaaay.
contrast this to how facebook operates (or how myspace operated): i realise it's information-overload, but that's *precisely* what makes facebook (and made myspace) an interesting place to be. there are several ways to get to the same stuff.
strange as it may be for someone who is alarmed at the ease by which it is possible on facebook to track someone down merely from their first name (yes i met someone at a party, couldn't remember their surname, but managed to guess their approximate age, guessed that they must live in the approximate nearby area, then used the advanced search on facebook to find them... took a couple of weeks to work out i have to admit, and no i am *not* going to describe here on slashdot how it's done...) ... ... despite that, i have to say that there is actually something useful, and just generally more... homely about facebook than their is about *any* google products. google products are just... sterile and functional. you use gmail to send mail. you use google search to... well... search. but you use *facebook* to tell everyone you know that you wiped your arse today, and that's hilarious.
it also occurs to me: i wouldn't want to put personal stuff up on google: they might index it and let people search on it. and i think that's really the key, there. facebook is closed. you *have* to have a login. your personal stuff is *not* indexed publicly in search engines.
so, sorry google: you got it wrong on this one, and you can't be trusted, even if you said you'd get it right.
Re:poisionous and risky name policy. (Score:5, Insightful)
pointed this out before, but google's policy of forcing people to give their *real* names is incredibly dangerous.
So I'm going to try to respond with "both sides" of this issue--
1. Google's real name policy [wikipedia.org] was horrific.
2. Still, they abandoned it months ago, with a pseudo-apology [google.com].
3. Still, it was too late for me, and I still refuse to sign up. In part this is because they have a no-opt-out "real location contact" address policy for developers [phandroid.com] which I find just as dangerous as their Google Plus real name policy.
4. Yes, I've sacrificed the ability to review Youtube videos and Play store apps/movies.
5. That said, 9% of 2.2 billion users is 198000000 users. Had the article been titled "198 million active users use Google Plus" regularly, this phrasing would have sounded to me like a success story.
Because it's a crime not to (Score:5, Informative)
they have a no-opt-out "real location contact" address policy for developers which I find just as dangerous as their Google Plus real name policy.
3. In some jurisdictions, operating a business without a public mailing address is a crime [slashdot.org].
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If one of the jurisdictions that bans running an anonymous business is your home state, such as California [sitetruth.com], you'd have to move as the first step of opting out. If one of them is your home country, such as countries in the European Union [sitetruth.com], good luck seeking a work visa elsewhere.
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If Google asks for my mobile phone number again I'm going to hit them with a wet noodle.
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Come on, that's not remotely comparable. If you're selling stuff in their store, they have a business relationship with you, of course you can't be entirely anonymous.
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I am not sure about that name policy statement. I mean, I have this guy in my circles:
https://plus.google.com/+Whatw... [google.com]
He's registered under "Jesus H. Christ", but I somehow doubt that that's his real name.
Re:poisionous and risky name policy. (Score:4, Interesting)
I know you young people might find this hard to believe, but being forced to use your *real* name on the Internet was the norm until the mid-1990s. Don't believe me? Go to Google Groups (where old USENET posts are archived) and browse anything from the early 1990s or before. It has everyone's real names, and *gasp* sometimes even their contact info. School, company, and government sysadmins voluntarily enforced an unwritten rule that you could not be anonymous on the Internet. When a method of doing something anonymously on the Internet was discovered, it was reported as a bug [google.com], and quashed at the earliest opportunity.
What brought anonymity to the Internet was, ironically, AOL joining USENET in 1993. See, AOL required you to use your real name when signing up (so they could bill your credit card). But they also allowed you to make up to 5 sub-accounts for free, ostensibly so your family members could use AOL services under their own name. Of course people immediately took advantage of this to create alter-egos which could make USENET posts anonymously.
So while I do think anonymity is better for the Internet (not that we could do anything about it if it were bad - that horse has long since fled the stable), don't make up stuff like real names being "incredibly dangerous." The Internet worked just fine for ~2 decades with everyone using their real names.
Re:poisionous and risky name policy. (Score:4, Informative)
You're wrong of course. Most people used their names because they couldn't change them. The UNIX sysadmins picked them. But there were plenty of anonymous names back then like Kibo.
You couldn't be more wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
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I had someone else's real name because they weren't using their account, and I was.
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The last time I googled my real name, I didn't even see my FB account. I saw several FB & Linkedin accounts with my name, but they weren't me. I did find a dumb question I asked on some mailing list, but nobody can prove that that was really me.
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it's possible under gmail to register very similar email addresses (with and without "." in them)
But [johnsmith@gmail] and [john.smith@gmail] are the same thing. Dots are not significant. Perhaps I misunderstood?
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I signed up soon after G+ started and didn't use my real name... The policy was not very well enforced. Since they removed all restrictions I just use my first name and a non-printing zero-width unicode space as my last name.
There is a lot of good stuff on G+. Good technical content that you can't get elsewhere. People post their work-in-progress ideas and projects in an informal setting where they don't need to spend time making it pretty, and often this means you get a lot more insight and a view of the p
numbers sounds dodgy (Score:5, Insightful)
If the numbers are accurate I am shocked. No way can I believe Google+ usage is that high.
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Just because you don't use it doesn't mean that nobody does. I like G+, there is a lot of good technical content on there. Unlike Facebook you don't get bombarded with pointless crap and inane updates, just a stream of interesting technical posts from people who know what they are talking about.
There are plenty of them too, because it's a nice haven away from from the river or diarrhoea that is Facebook and the foul rage-fest that is YouTube and almost every other site these days.
Backing up your photos (Score:2)
I think I use Google+ because that's the default way of backing up your photos on Android.
I don't hate Google+, but it's just not that useful. Facebook, on the other hand, is useful, and they're not doing much to Google+ to make it more useful.
Who knows how long it will last? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who wants to spend lots of time building a Google Plus network and posting there regularly when Google has a habit of shutting down services with little warning?
At least you have some assurance that Facebook is not going to stop being Facebook, but Google could decide that Google Plus is not worth continuing and shut it down.
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This. A million times, this.
I used to read about 80 webcomics. Most daily.
I'd also read about another 30-40 pages whenever they updated.
Google Reader made it so easy, all I had to do was click the Next button in my bookmark bar over and over until I ran out of Internet. My only whine was that it was always newest first, which sucked if I missed a day for whatever reason and would end up seeing today's comics before yesterday's. :(
But then Google killed off Reader, and now I only read XKCD and Cyanide+Happin
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So roll your own RSS feed aggregator.
Personally, I find that Selfoss [aditu.de] is a fantastic replacement for Google Reader.
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There are good things Google does, one is the ability to export your user data, including posts.
If you use this, export in JSON format, not HTML. You can use tools such as jq to export specific records, including your source marked-up text.
This allows you to re-post content elsewhere (though that can still be work).
That is nice, but for affected users it hardly makes up for shutting down the service -- kind of like a university shutting down while you're mid way through your degree program and telling you "No worries... here's a copy of your transcript, you can transfer your credits to a new school... well, if you can find a school that will accept them!"
Huh? *Scratches head* (Score:4, Informative)
Seems pretty lively to me. Even too lively, at times. I have about a thousand people circled, and am circled by a few thousand. I do post public, but I post more private posts. People in my circles have a similar ration - maybe a bit more public than private, but very similar ratio to mine.
My experience of G+ is that it's a buzzing, lively, chaotic place with the usual fun, or thoughtful, or sometimes dramatic posts. Interestingly enough, I don't have any member of my family posting on G+
At times my experience of G+ can be a bit frenzied, but it's mostly fun. DEFINITELY not boring.
Re:Huh? *Scratches head* (Score:5, Insightful)
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Echoing this thread.
Assessing G+ activity by counting public posts is like assessing a community's sexual activity by looking at marriage licenses.
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It goes up and down over time. Was more active last year than now, and much of what I see is communities or the "what's hot" (which I need to turn off, that political fight has gone non stop since the election, despite being nearly non-existent before the election). But at this point there is no alternative really.
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These posts are not for users of G+ that know how it actually works, but they are so that the ones that didn't sign up for G+ can feel snug about not missing out.
When in fact they miss out on the (for me) best place to get in contact with like-minded and not friends from high-school that I don't want.
I post to G+ a few times a day but I can't even remember last time I posted publicly.
A different view - I use Google Plus every day (Score:5, Insightful)
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The conclusions are bogus. (Score:5, Insightful)
The conclusions are bogus. The numbers they run only examine public posting, because the data on private posting is inaccessible to them, and then they draw conclusions based on that. Most Google+ activity is private and/or takes place within groups.
One of the people involved stated "just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post content", (emphasis added) and then from that the article concludes no one uses it.
They also picked the first 18 days of the year to analyze the data; this is prime vacation time for most people for 7-14 of those days.
His distribution assumptions are not evidence based, they are straight assumptions about uniform distributions, and they are all drawn from a single file of 45K profiles, which is the same thing as saying "If you want a straight line fit, only select a single data point".
It'd be much more useful if he had verified the distribution uniformity through an analysis of other sitemap files, and even better if he'd just spun up an EC2 instance and looked at *all* of them.
But I'm sure he got a lot of clicks out of this.
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it's not entirely bullshit.
they forced g+ on every youtube commenter to drive up the usage statistics. I'm "active" on google plus and I know plenty of other "active" people too, while in reality we're just continuing to use youtube as we used before g+. and that's majority of g+ use. so if you take that out what you're left with is peanuts, almost everyone with a google+ account doesn't do anything non-youtube related with the google+ account and this is accurate! fuck, I would say that 1.5 billion of thos
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One of the biggest reasons a lot of people that use Google+ is that it's easier to keep posts relatively private. I don't need to have pictures of my kids published to everyone on the net, or tell everyone in the world when I'm on vacation, or have all kinds of crap out there for potential employers to find. Google+ makes it easy to post to a small (or large) group without posting publicly. Basing numbers on public posts is FUD, it's worse than meaningless, it's misleading.
9% (Score:2)
9% of 2.2 billion users means that there are over 220 million users posting content.
That is an interesting definition of "almost nobody".
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Ingress is by far the largest use case/best ad for G+ among people I know. The multi-continent operations people pull off are a testament to how useful G+ can be for sharing plans and coordinating with just the right people.
that's right. and here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is posting public content. That's exactly right. That is by design.
This is why G+ is better than facebook. You can post content to specifically who you want to. This is a lot harder to do on Facebook.
I /never/ post public content on either network. Never. But I do post a lot to my circles on G+, and the granularity of control is why I prefer it.
The study is flawed, because the researcher does not understand what he is studying.
flawed methodology (Score:4, Informative)
This analysis (by necessity) only included *public* posts to Google+, which makes the conclusion completely meaningless.
You can't just sweep that detail under the rug when comparing Google+ to something like Facebook. One of Google+'s biggest selling points is the ability to actually control exactly who can and cannot see everything you post, so the proportion of posts that are completely wide open to the public is going to be much, much lower than on Facebook.
There's plenty of activity there, this guy just can't see it because it's being shared privately among friends and not with the entire internet. And rightly so.
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Exactly. I know several people who's primary posts on google+ are to complain about their job. That's not the sort of thing smart people would want to make public.
Public? (Score:2)
The advantage of Google+ is that it's easy to limit posts to the circles that you want to see the posts. I expect that very little of the content is public.
Buy Facebook. (Score:3)
Deal of the century.
My 70 year old mother and all of her friends use Facebook instead of the phone now.
You lose. Accept it. Write the cheque.
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Exactly, your kids are probably reconsidering their use of Facebook and are transitioning to other venues.
Quality not Amount (Score:4, Funny)
Perhaps the problem is that people who use G+ post things when they have something to of value say, not when they took a shit.
My circles are pretty active, no, I don't know what they had for lunch though.
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Absolutely. The quality of content is far better than on FB or Twitter. When G+ was a year old or so, an image was circulated comparing the most discussed people on 3 social networks. On Facebook and Twitter is was Rihanna and Justin Bieber, on Google+ it was Einstein. I'm regularly having interesting political, philosophical and ethical discussions there. And most importantly to me personally: it's probably the best RPG community on the Web.
Looking only at the number of public posts is fairly meaningless;
Sending pictures in hangouts chat (Score:2)
I use it... (Score:2)
... to store photos. They have a handy "share via link" function for entire albums, so you can easily share entire albums with friends (albeit without fine grained control of permissions... basically anyone with the link re-share it at will). There's no storage limit for images up to 2048px (longest side), and there's an easy way to download individual images as well as entire zipped albums.
As a social network though? Hahaha, I only have a Facebook account for Messenger - wtf would I need another network fo
What do I have to say to the public? (Score:2)
I am not the kind of person to stand up on a soap box at Hyde Park Corner. So why would I post to the public? I do it to promote my boat building web site, period. Everything else I have to say is reserved for "family" or "friends" or other special interest groups/comunities.
Hey doesn't that sound a lot like "social media"?
mistake (Score:2)
Google made mistake by forcing usage of Google+, nobody wants to be forced - and nobody wants to make all things public. It can be a lesson to others.
It's better than most people realize (Score:2)
I use it. Granted I'm not a daily poster, I never was on Facebook (deleted that account). I have friends and followers that will give me a + on many things. The communities are quite active actually.
If you hop on + and then do nothing, it will do nothing. If you get on and follow a few folks (think following on twitter) you'll be amazed at how much is actually posted. Join a few communities of things you enjoy, and you're page will be filled faster than you can imagine.
Some communities have hangouts /
Value Proposition to Me? (Score:3)
I don't have a Facebook account. I don't have a Twitter account. I don't have accounts on these services because they don't provide me any services I need or want. Maybe they're valuable to you and that's fine but for me they are not useful. Google+ is pretty much in the same boat for me. There is no clear value proposition for me but there is a very clear value to Google. Hence I do not foresee me using Google+ in any social media capacity. All it seems to do is provide Google a way to track what I do and profit from it even better than the already creepy amount they do now. No thanks...
Google+ is great (Score:3)
What sucks about Google+ is that Google tries to artificially inflate the numbers by forcing it on YouTube and other services, and they seem to be actively punishing people for using both Google+ and any other Google service, but on its own, Google+ is great. It was great during its early days before Google started to mess it up. The people who use G+ use it a lot and post far more interesting stuff on it than you're likely to see on FB or Twitter.
Google should learn to be happy with having something good, rather than ruining it by forcing it on people and then punishing them for it. And they should work to improve it further, rather than adding crap. I mean, who ever asked for polls, of all things? We want better tools to manage our stream. That's Google+'s strength, but there's so much more that could be done here. Instead we get polls.
I don't originate much, (Score:2)
but I comment a lot
The place is full of vertical groups - photographers, loads of technical (even iPhans), Political discussions from the US far right to the rest of the planets left, news about anything and everything from everywhere and no doubt stuff that I am not interested in and so have ignored...
So this is yet another posting from someone who has not really checked out the system.
Need and greed. (Score:2)
With the rise of social media sites that allow for the vast collection of data one people it was only natural that a company like Google that does just that wanted in on that game. So for them to want to establish G+ as a service is no surprise to anyone.
They way they did it however was pretty terrible and they deserved to fail. First of all they had to address the fact that some people are not going to want to join such a service; period. They don't want Facebook, never wanted MySpace, delete those anno
Pics Only (Score:2)
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Have you see FB's market cap? I'm pretty sure they don't.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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I doubt FB would take that offer, and I'm not entirely sure Apple actually could physically make it. But ignoring that it would be the worst possible merger you can imagine. There are no 2 more polar opposite cultures in the valley than those two.
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And that's stock, not cash. I don't think even Google has 200B cash sitting around. For the sale to go through they'd have to give stock, and at a premium. Realistically you'd see FB owning 35-50% of the new company in an all stock deal. Just not feasible.
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According to the internet, Google only has ~ $60B in their war chest. But they could always sell stock to raise cash, it wouldn't have to be all stock.
I'm seeing more use of Google+ all the time. Especially for political discussions. 9% of 2.2B is... a lot!
Seems fine to me (Score:4, Informative)
I post. Doesn't seem to suck to me. My family is there, my friends are there.
It could be better. Faster, mostly, and a little better at blocking other users, but all in all, I find it adequate to my needs.
Also, I wonder about the analysis. Perhaps all the active users are in the AI and other groups where I hang out; but somehow, I doubt it. Maybe I don't understand what he means by "post public content"; wouldn't that be a post to a group or a post to one's own profile? Because there's a great deal of that going on.
Anyway. As long as it's there, I plan to use it. Meets my needs.
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That can't be an atypical way to use the service, and I don't know how they could realistically measure that.
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Yeah, I use it a lot too. Plenty of communities with interesting discussions going on. I don't get the "I had a bad day, sympathise with me" posts that I got sick of on facebook. Also, a lot of friends of mine use it, posting photos of what they've been doing on their travels, etc.
Re:Because it sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
It only sucks to the inane people. There are several huge technical communities over that they have a massively lower noise to signal ratio. If you want to talk tech and not cat photos, G+ is where it's at.
The Sport Touring community on G+ destroys the one on FB.
Don't look, but ... (Score:2)
... your ratio's upside down.
Re:Because it sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Except the "inane people" on FB are 10x more populous and 20x more likely to click on ads. The market doesn't give a shit about "technical communities", it cares about eyeballs.
Re: Because it sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Heck no, the whole benefit of G+ is the privacy, not spamming people you care about with things they don't, control.
it's great there isn't a ton of useless public content there, there is no noise, all signal. I post multiple times daily, but nobody knows that since only the relevant people can see the message.
It's replaced email, texting, twitter, phoning, become an actul useful communication medium with nothing to complain about.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
"Social" networking sites are for losers who don't have real friends. Google+ is for bigger losers who don't even have virtual friends.
Re: Because it sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
No shit. I was okay with using G+ and really thought it had some great features and potential until Google started getting all fucking dark overlordish about using real names. That was when I drifted away from using it.
But as you mentioned, that bullshit about youtube commenting was insanely stupid. As was their decision to disallow commenting on Google Play without a vaild G+ account.
All that real name/closed environment bullshit was thought up by one very, very insecure person who had little experience (as compared to us older computer users) who did use GEnie, CompuServe, and Delphi for our first internet access and who also used dial-up BBSs back when a modem was an acoustic device you clamped onto a phone's handset.
Fucking google.... Still in mid-air during this shark jump.
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Maybe you do not understand it because you are dumb? Try: plus.goog
le.com
If you're going to be snarky, be snarky about the right thing -- the GooglePlus.com URL does take you to your Google Plus home page.
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True about the URL - but also of my 20-ish G+ friends, almost half are GOOGLE EMPLOYEES (and ALL are techies). And among them I only have 4 posts in the last month.
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slightly OT, but its something I wonder about. suppose you are not a fan of the company Google, and you avoid as many of their services as you can. you never joined g+ and you block most of google's domains. you hate their spying and corporate lack of ethics.
now, suppose you are a tech worker and the company you work for gets bought by google. oh oh....
what do you do? suppose you are one who is going to stay (not get thrown to the side during corporate merging that usually goes on after an acquisition)
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also, let me ask a very related question: suppose you found a job at FB that is applicable to your background, but, like g+, you totally hate the concept of FB and never joined. now, the job at FB is directly relevant to your expertise and career path.
what happens, then? do they test you to see if you are 'like them'? do they outright ask for your social media id (not pw, but username)? if they sense you are not a 'joiner' will they even offer you a job, there?
this has also crossed my mind. I never joi
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Its that social network your one friend who flat-out refuses to use Facebook, signed up for without a second thought and posts on all the time.