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Facebook Says That Google+ Has No Users
dkd903 noticed another amusing shot in the battle between G+ and Facebook. CNN is running a story where Facebook's director of game partnership Sean Ryan basically says Google+ has no users. The article is mostly about casual gaming on social platforms, which I am really sick of individually blocking.
There are no companies (users in Facebook speak) actively mining your content on Google+.
Facebook's data mining is more insidious.
As for circles, being able to direct messages at friends, family, the world, is enormously useful. The problem is it means you have to decide on every post who you want to share it with. However, that means you know who every post is going to.
From the "thank you Captain Obvious" department, something that's in an invite-only beta practically has no users. Really? How did you ever get THAT idea?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Isn't no Farmville spam the entire selling point of Google+? Everybody I know using it is there precisely because it's NOT Facebook and doesn't have all the annoying spam (and even more annoying emo users) that make Facebook a wasteland of human stupidity.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Google+ has no users, but Facebook has no users worth talking to.
I think I'll take Google+ if I'm forced to choose one.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Then you're doing it wrong.
Put some interesting people in your circles. It's not all geeks. There's a very active bunch of photographers sharing images, people talking about cooking, local conversations (the mobile app does geolocation-based searches), and group video chat (Hangouts).
Plenty is happening when I log in, but then I have about 500 people in my circles, and more than twice that number have me in their circles. My circles are quite a bit more active (and informative) than my Facebook news feed, but less than my Twitter feed.
There is room for multiple services. This isn't the Highlander.
Besides, I'm not quite comfortable with Google's datamining.
Oh look! It's another paid Facebook hypocrite shill. Didn't you guys' astroturfing campaign get exposed months ago? And you're still at it?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
It's sad watching people argue over which advertising conglomerate they want to give all their personal information to.
Facebook's data mining is more insidious.
How? People keep repeating this, but nobody has any details. What, exactly, has FB done with personal data that's so evil? Anyone?
How about every time I turn off sharing of data with other websites, they issues a *new* privacy policy and all the sudden I'm sharing my data with other websites again?
Facebook is a privacy nightmare.
Google+ is a non-starter for me until/unless they stop locking out people who need to be anonymous. Facebook is too, but I never had any expectation that Facebook would do anything right -- Google, frankly, I would like to see get back to at least attempting to "do no evil."
I think they're waiting for someone to give a use case for why anonymous people need Google+ specifically.
Frankly, if you're in a position to need anonymity (as opposed to just wanting it), you should be staying off social networks in general.
I do.
when I say "9 times out of 10 i get better discussion" I'm talking about topics that would warrant discussion.
I think that a lot of my friends just "skim" facebook for interesting stuff, but dig in to google+ because there's less there, so you have more time to peruse each post.
It's like the tabloids at the supermarket. you're standing in line there, maybe you see that lindsey lohan has done something stupid or one of the kardashians is pregnant or tom cruise has been proven to be a robot or something. maybe you'll even pick up one and look at it for a few seconds... but there's so much garbage there that you just skim it and ignore most of it.
if instead of 15 tabloids you had, say, 2 newspapers, you'd probably spend a lot more time looking at a given article in the time available to you.
Honestly, I've found that very few of my facebook friends have much to say really. everything is in 1 or 2 sentence bites at best. occasionally somebody's post may have a good comments section where you can have a lively debate, but not often. I'm guessing that facebook limits you to about 4 or 5 sentences in your inital post to discourage people from posting 30-page spam updates or something like that, but considering that they auto-shorten anything beyond about 3 lines anyway, what's the point? I very much enjoy that Google+ will let my inital post be whatever the hell I want it to be.