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Users Spend More Time On Myspace Than Google+
pigrabbitbear writes "Google is boasting that more than 90 million people have signed up for its Google+. Those are pretty impressive numbers. I mean, if you had 90 million people at your disposal, you could do anything. You'd rule the Internet. Except there's one little problem: No one is using the site. The Wall Street Journal has the hard, unfiltered truth: According to comScore numbers, users spent an average of 3 minutes on G+ in the entire month of January. Facebook users spent 405 minutes, or nearly 7 hours, on the site. People managed to find 17 minutes to spare to add connections on LinkedIn. Heck, even Myspace users — many of whom are probably ghost accounts — surfed for eight minutes over the month."
Wow, nobody has posted yet. Apparently nobody cares about Google + enough to even try for a first post.
I know I've seen no incentive whatsoever to use Google+, and I have a gmail account that I've had for years which doesn't correspond to a real name -- so their whole "thou shalt have a real name" as an ID thing is a non-starter for me.
In all honesty, I'm not even sure of what Google + is meant to be used for, or why I'd even care.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Simple reason is that facebook is already a working hub for all of my friends, there are those who have switched to google plus, but as long as all my friends, all my co-workers and all of my family, is already in one place? Why go someplace else? Google needs to blow some capital to get people to move. Offer incentives to switch, that's how business works.
Maybe because many inde group sitll uses myspace as a platform to stream music... ?
What is MySpace?
(j/k)
One what?
Every end has half a stick.
Nice, now get rid of it and return the + operator to the search engine please.
...it leverages the dominant position it gained from its PageRank search system (which, like all good things, was done in an academic environment and then closed for profit) during the dotcom boom to sell eyeballs to increasingly desperate advertisers across the world.
Everything else is as any other company would achieve, if it had the cash to buy reasonable talent and buy out any company which might correspond to its interests. But there are no stars in Google.
Kinda reminds us of that M... place. You know, the one with the HILARIOUS borg icon on /. for so long, because MS was so interested in merging your knowledge with its o.. oh.
G+ fits my desire for social-networking perfectly: I hardly have to spend any time on it to get what I want out of it. I spend no time whatsoever on the other systems, because they're more cumbersome and demand my time in ways I'm not comfortable with. G+ is the only system that lets me contribute the little amount of time I'm willing to contribute, without being useless. So maybe its users *do* use it for fewer minutes a month -- but isn't that okay? Is there not a market for that? Lots of people probably watch crappy TV -- should we judge other channels based on the fact that they have a few, well-targeted shows, that a segment of the population watches (but nothing else)? Maybe it should be our goal to use these systems less, not more! In that respect, G+ represents an increase in efficiency -- which is a driver of GNP. So it's a good thing. Go G+!
the problem with social networking is the is very low barrier to entry. If someone comes up with a shiny new widget then people will dump facebook just like they dumped myspace.
Whichever pleasure website is today's flavour of the month tends to leave me stone-cold.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
3 minutes on G+ because they like it but most of their friends on family are still using Facebook. However, MySpace is still getting 7 hours per user each month because they still can't figure out how to cancel their account. ... it really is that hard for some folks. ;-)
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
So an optimist might say that maybe the more intelligent and self disciplined of the population have switched to G+, and are spending less time there because they use it intelligently, i.e. a lot less. It turns out that nobody cares that you cleaned the lint from between your toes, and also that Facebook, G+, and other social networking sites are parasitic honeypots designed to turn your private life into an advertising asset. So, good for G+ users!
A pessimist would say that G+ just hasn't caught on much -- and they would probably be right.
Google could do well if they pivoted to the niche market of academics, science, engineering, technology, and journalists. Some of the discussions on Google+ for those areas of interest are actually very high quality. Certainly better than anything you get on Facebook.
It's highly subjective and a matter of personal taste, but I find the interface and presentation of Google+ to be superb, it really blows FB out of the water. I can't stand how cluttered and busy it's become while G+ is clean and just feels right. The "circles" metaphor and interface is a pretty good step forward for social networking, it doesn't get the credit it deserves for at least being the easiest to use and understand way to bring some granularity to what you share and who you share it with.
I don't want to see Facebook unseated, but I would love to see Google light a fire under them. Competition is good for users of both sites.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Somehow I stumbled across Google+ on my phone earlier when I was playing around with it. I figured, well, some of the things it did sounded pretty cool, so I'll give it a try. I could always get back out of it, I guess. So I did, grudgingly and forcibly "agreeing" to the terms of service which I thought were a crock of shit and were about cause me to just say fuck the whole thing. I barely did anything on Google+ though, I gave up quick. Just didn't see the point.
Then somehow I came across the Google+ article on Wikipedia last night. It's a social networking web site? Like Facebook and Myspace? Fuck that. Deleted my Google+ account on the spot. Gave them my reasoning while I was at it--I don't want any social networking bullshit. And that includes the other two I mentioned. I just do not get the whole point of social networking. Give me instant messaging and e-mail for occasional use and I'm set. Giving up so much privacy is not worth going all-out social networking, I just don't get the point of those services and can't justify putting everything out there in public, while giving companies tons of personal information to sell.
Mr. Horowitz declined to share data about how much time people spend on Google+ but said "we're growing by every metric we care about." ...
When asked what metrics Google+ cared about, the answer was a straight faced "Any metric that is growing"
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Nerds spend more time on /. than any other use spend time on G+. Or MySpace. Or both added up together.
sign(c14n(envelop(this)), x509)
What Google failed to understand is that superior technology or features does not attract people to something; the culture, meaning the people, do. Everyone who cared about social networking was already on Facebook, or at least everybody they knew was, so what incentive was there to suddenly make the switch to Google+? Switching for switching's sake? People don't operate that way.
There are really only three types of people: those who go where everyone else goes, the smaller group who specifically want to go where everybody else does not go, and those few types who consistently keep believing that superior technologies (whether in operating systems, phones, media players, or gaming devices) are what dictate the market.
Google+ attracted much of the second and third groups, but almost none of the first. And why? Because it's as though Google+ was a party at a huge, new mansion, and Facebook was a party at a slightly smaller, older mansion. Sure, Google+ had more stuff, and their house was maybe built a little better, but everybody was already at Facebook's party. And Google failed to understand that promises of toys don't win people over; everyone else having those toys does.
Was spent loading 200 5-minute GIFs & 12 youtube embeds all autoplaying at the same time
Could it be that those that use G+ don't allow ads/cookies/widgets et cetera to track them?
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The article is very light on specifics of where this data was obtained, other than pointing at Comscore.
I suspect the original source was this ComScore blog article. Even that article is very light on methodology.
Quoting:
While Google Plus nearly matches Tumblr from an audience standpoint in the U.S., it does not yet attract similar levels of user engagement on its primary web pages. Importantly, these figures account for activity on plus.google.com and [but] do not include engagement with the Google Plus toolbar or other distributed content throughout the Google network of sites.
Right there seems to be an admission that ComScore isn't able to measure the total engagement, because they can't see it, and nobody needs to access plus.google.com once they are signed up. All the links you need appear on pages protected by https.
The very nature of Google+, with its circles of friends may work against any outsiders having any real access to the amount of time spent there by the average user. and, google's use of https makes this harder still.
These guys are shooting in the dark.
Still, I tend to agree, I only know of a few bloggers who think its cool to hang the little G+ symbol behind their names.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I spend about 72 hours/day on google plus. I am guessing that they didn't count all the domains that are used to check your google + account such as Google.com and gmail.com in their stats. I spend 24 hours per day on each of those sites, usually on 3 or 4 different devices.
Failed attempt at a first post.
English is not this
Does G+ have ads? I only use browsers with an ad blocker so I'm not sure. About a third of the article was fixation on advertisers interest, or lack thereof, WRT G+, which I thought was strange because I could swear they don't even have ads.
G+ is pretty popular in the ham radio and technical community. Linus makes posts worth reading. It seems like "technology podcaster" types use G+ heavily. Seems to be a lot of maker/hardware hacker type people on G+. Theres an interesting crowd of weather-freaks who like to second guess the NWS forecasters and do their own NAM and GFS analysis (I'm into it enough to know what they're talking about, but its not really my thing)
As far as news I circle Perl Weekly, Anonymous, and a software engineer named Margaret Leber who seems to share about 3 zerohedge articles per day.
Mike Elgan and Dan McDermott/Steve Mayne had some pretty insightful G+ posts WRT this whole "non-issue". Maynes post pretty much summarize the whole topic, a typical FB post results in 300 mostly idiot comments and G+ only has 20 comments but the average IQ level in the G+ posts is around 40 points higher. Its not as intelligent as /. is, at least when I'm posting, but G+ is up there (smile that was a joke)
Its not all good. G+ has way too many chicks who post hot-ish G to PG-13 rated pics of themselves (playboy models, strippers) and babble. It was entertaining for a bit but I can get better pics for free elsewhere, so bye bye ladies. Theres always some political moron who bellows loudly but doesn't know much.
Seems like GOOG needs to do a bit of product differentiation. FB is for the kid you sat next to in study hall in 8th grade, grind casual games, chicks gossiping and fighting with each other, spammy company fan pages (chose your own selection of free spam!) and sharing pics with granny. In contrast, G+ seems to be interesting people.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So it takes me 7 hours to do everything on Facebook that it takes me only 3 minutes to do on Google+? I like the efficiency rating.
You know those rating systems are flawed. They don't take in account houses that have, uh, more than two computers, and other things of that nature.
You have a "profile", and you "post status updates", which your "friends" can "comment on" or "like".
No matter hot you look at it, if you remove the nice animations and colors you have the same system. The differences are not enough for people for switch.
Google needs to do something new and daring, and G+ isn't it.
I predict that there will be a Facebook-killer, but it will have to go where Google is afraid to go, it will be mostly a placeholder for content that you post where you want on the internet.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
people with lives use G+
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The conversations I enjoy having are on Google+. I've never enjoyed the way people interact on Facebook, and I've never wanted to be there. I have an account there that I pay attention to as little as I can manage.
LJ used to have those kinds of conversations. But that petered out after Six Apart bought them. Now it's Google+. And if it never becomes 'popular', I don't care, as long as it is popular enough that Google considers it worth having around. And of course, that's the rub.
I don't like this whole cloud business at all. It's a broken model.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
... to keep Yahoo from suing them.
Check your premises.
Most of the stories here I've already read on google+ or Reddit
And the conversations tend to have more signal than noise.
I wonder, did facebook hire a PR agency to smear google again?
That was my biggest disappointment with Google+. They had a golden opportunity to integrate social networking, chat, and email, and all they did was throw up a knockoff of Facebook. I have gmail up nearly constantly, not so much with Facebook
Specifically, google emailed me last night that they will suspend my account if I don't use me real name.
Apparently their desire for new users is less than their need to be dicks to the ones they have.
Too bad. I liked G+.
I definitely prefer google+ and it made me dislike facebook even more than I had before. But since no one you know is on it, you end up follow a lot of strangers (did find some interesting people). The problem is that the filter controls are so awful (the last I looked) that I never want to use it. The circles concept is great, but they never got it out of the early development stage. Your stream consists of everybody or one circle. They released a beta and moved on to focusing on auto-sharing everything you do with your circles and a whole lot of other things that nobody wanted.
At the end of the day, I just don't have time for it. With sensible noise controls, that could change. But with everything else going so wrong with google this past year, I don't really want to use their products anymore anyway.
So I went back to facebook, sort of. It was such a sorry experience compared to g+ that I find I hardly visit there anymore either. I'll do a quick check in once in a while and then get out.
Let's not forget that the primary demographic in which any new trend starts is the college-age to twenties crowd.
Facebook smartly captured this specific demographic and their attention (away from Friendster and MySpace), because of two main reasons, whichi Google+ does not have:
1) social acceptance (ie friend confirmation button)
and
2) being the "first" network in which people could feel unstalkerish by stalking people they barely know but would possibly like to know better (flirtation, becoming friends, etc)
1) it started off being an "in-network-only" - what does that mean? It means, the college students which were its first users, mostly wanted to check out those hot girl/guys in their classes. It also had a "confirm friend", so you gained some sort of "acceptance" that it was consensual "stalking".
Google+, however, misses that boat: anyone can add you, without your consent (you can only block, not force them to unfriend). That means there is no "confirmed acceptance", missing out on a key social-emotional facet.
2) Furthermore, Facebook has most momentum *not* because it has "all your friend", but because it has "all the cool/hot girl/guys you'd like to be better friends with but-only-met-once-at-a-party-and-do-not-want-to-overtly-add-on-another-network-again". If google+ finds a way to migrate this set over to G+, I'd wager the G+ snowball would start rolling, and rolling pretty fast.
As an example, I was one of the first on facebook. So was my circle. But guess which same circle is on my G+ ? That's right! The geeky circle I have that was first on these due to being in "ivies" and having "friends who work at google". However, which group is missing from my G+ and everyone else? Those acquaintances you met once and never met again? Some you unfriend, but some you still want to see as a contact.
tl,dr:
1) Facebook's confirm friend button works far better to make users feel safe
2) Facebook has snowball effect due to people having already added, surprisingly, not their EXISTING friends but rather the *acquantainces* they'd *like-to-get-to-know-better* but would rather not admit to "stalking" by adding them on another network again.
Sorry, we were too busy on G+ to worry about first post....
"The Wall Street Journal has the hard, unfiltered truth"
Yeah, except it doesn't count mobile users. G+ is mostly cutting edge geeks who are using the app at least as much as the website. It doesn't define which users it is counting. Is this counting active users, signed up and never returned users, who? Considering anyone with a Google account now has a G+ account, the numbers can easily be far off what the active user numbers would be. If they were testing me, and testing mobile, I'd easily clock in about 8 hours average a day (always checking on phone, commenting in discussions, on tablet, on at work, etc.)
Also, many of us geeks got family to join. We all but boycott Facebook, so they have to log in every once in a while just to check on us, but never interact.
From personal experience, I have 1000+ followers, follow 200+, and it take me more than 3 minutes a day just to get through the first page of posts. Also, I hyper share with G+, because it's people I share interests, not genes, with.
Compared to Slashdot: I've posted more interesting stories than Slashdot had today. I've read more interesting stories separately as well. I've had better discussions that on Slashdot. Millions of users, only a couple thousand posts per day... Maybe the Slashdot crowd shouldn't be throwing stones. Reading all the blurbs, I could easily fit Slashdot into 3 minutes a day or less.
Besides, many posted this story before it was on Slashdot. Became old news quick, already fully parsed, dissected, and discussed. Glad to see /. catch up to G+, and then poo-poo it, lol.
I8-D
German article taking apart some of that "hard, unfiltered truth": http://t3n.de/news/google-geisterstadt-371000/
Google Translate: http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Ft3n.de%2Fnews%2Fgoogle-geisterstadt-371000%2F
I'm afraid Mary is dead.
Which brings it all back to the merits of the two services to the end users.
Well, that's about a zero for G+, by the looks of things. However, FB is unequivocally heavily into negative territory in terms of merit to end users (even attempting to track non-users?). This is one reason why my router blocks all access to all of FB's IP ranges, thus rendering all those "like" buttons polluting other pages utterly harmless. These stupid "like" buttons are shown, but it's actually impressive or astonishing how much other stuff around the web is replaced by "denied" messages by the router.
I've an open mind about Google, but Facebook is definitely at the wrong end of the good-evil axis.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
pig's feet compared to top sirloin
Average user time is the wrong metric to look at for a developing social network, because the engagement across users isn't flat, and shouldn't be modeled that way. Think of it this way - if I'm a Google+ user who actively uses the product, I have a whole network of friends to engage with and post back and forth, so the average time spent by my network is probably fairly high. If I'm a user who signed up for Google+ because of the hype, then never bothered to post anything, it's probably because my network of friends is filled with people who act similarly. This means you'll have networks that are full of engaged users and networks that are completely barren - and the average will probably be something meaningless like three minutes a month. What's the distribution look like? Of the people who're posting more than three minutesper month, are they checking it every day for an hour? Is it just the rest of the users who are dragging down the metrics, ultimately leading everyone to believe Google+ is dead when there are pockets of vibrant user communities? This is the information they should look into.
There's a whole industry out there spamming Google+. There's "googleplus1supply.com", ("total +1s sent to our clients: 25,364,921"), "plus1sem.com" ("Buy 2000 Google Plus Ones and SKYROCKET your rankings") "buyplus1fans.com" ("Our service helps boost your Google +1 presence which will convert into higher rankings equaling more customers!"), and "buyrealplusone.com" ("Crush your competition!"). A sizable fraction of Google+ accounts are probably from spammers.
We have a paper on this: "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social", which is a tour of the social spam ecosystem. At the top are advertising agencies, which hire SEO firms to boost their rankings and don't ask too many questions. The SEO firms buy those fake "+1"s, "Likes", and, until Google stopped counting them, "tweets". The businesses which sell the +1s and "likes" deal with firms that create and sell fake Google and Facebook accounts. Further down into the slime are the businesses that sell short-term IP addresses and phone numbers for verification of the fake accounts. Down at the bottom are the botnets that host much of this.
Social networking is the web spammer's dream. No expensive link farm sites to host and fill with fresh content. The social networks host your spam for you, for free.
Narrowing the reach of "social" signals with "circles" and friend lists helps a little, but not all that much. That's why there are programs which generate accounts which appear to be from young women.
Right on. Just measuring time spent on something doesn't determine it's value, that's the wrong metric.
Time spent is a measure of cost, not value. Value must be measured using other criteria.
The entire premise of the article is garbage. It seems to assume that a great amount of time wasted struggling (no doubt against massed stupidity) to get a simple thing done was worth more than getting the same thing done quickly, easily, and efficiently.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
<SARCASM=ON> OK, the average visitor spends about 1 hour at Walmart while the average buyer at Amazon leaves the site after 3min. So drop your Amazon shares and buy Walmarts....</SARCASM>
This is such a 20th century metric ;-)
In earnest: Perhaps FB ist usefull to people who don't know what to do else. I am perfectly happy to be up-to-date with most of my contacts in 10min on G+. Time is the most valuable stuff i have.
Having comScore in their HOST file. :)
I didn't know who comScore was but it's in my HOSTS file under a few different addresses. I go through my cookies
before I delete them, trackers or such I'll add to my rather huge HOSTS file.
Myself, I don't do "social" sites.
Google+, however, misses that boat: anyone can add you, without your consent (you can only block, not force them to unfriend). That means there is no "confirmed acceptance", missing out on a key social-emotional facet.
I almost never post public unless its a pretty generic brag (hey! look world, I built me a ... or bought me a ...) I almost always post to circles and I control who is in those circles. Creepy people of the universe can circle me all they want, but they're only gonna see stuff I'd post on my virtual front lawn or my resume.
This operation mode is entirely different from what I remember on FB where all your friends saw all the junk you posted.
The "confirmed acceptance" on G+ is when I circle you back and put you in whatever individual or combination of circles I feel appropriate, based on your previous public posts or your filled out profile. Most people on G+ operate this way, which might explain to you why you see people ranting along the lines of "WTF do people circle me but they won't fill out their profile or post anything". Your pictures have your QSL card and ham radio callsign and you go in the ham radio circle, you have a picture of your homemade SMD reflow oven you go in my hardware hackers circle, you have blank profile and no public posts I ignore you and you never see anything other than my rare public post.
Circle me on G+ and you'll only see about 1% of my total activity, if that, until I figure out who the heck you are and which of my hobby circles you belong in.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Google is all about performance, making sure people spend less time to do stuff. They measure performance in terms of how many people they kill waiting for a search result or accessing some feature of a Google product. For instance if 90 million people had to wait 1 second for a Google+ page to load that is equal to robbing someone of approx 3 years of their life. If a billion people had to wait 1 second for a search result, that is equivalent of wasting 31 years of someones life.
So, by not having much content on Google+ and not making it very interesting, Google is saving billions of lives.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Google+, however, misses that boat: anyone can add you, without your consent (you can only block, not force them to unfriend). That means there is no "confirmed acceptance", missing out on a key social-emotional facet.
This is exactly what I like about G+. I put the friends I want in the circles I want. My friends do the same. Everybody's happy.
Google should start a partnership program for Google+ like they have for Youtube. Popular bloggers should get a percentage of the ad revenue based on the number of people who have added them to their circles times the number of posts. Or maybe better based on the total number of +1s they receive in a given time period.
Zombie Lane!
What Facebook has over all of the other players is the network effect. Metcalf's Law tells us that everyone is on Facebook because... well, everyone is on Facebook. Yes, when Facebook upset its user base back in September, lots of people created Google+ accounts which are now dormant. BUT... those people now have Google+ accounts. They're not going away. Every time Facebook does something to irritate its user base, more people will create Google+ accounts out of frustration and a desire to "stick it" to Facebook. This has the potential (but is in in no way guaranteed) to iterate enough times that it could reach a tipping point. I don't think it would tip without two things happening: 1.) Google+ changing its experience to make Facebookers feel more at home, and 2.) Facebook doing something boneheaded that infuriates lots of people to vocally switch (after the critical mass has been assembled on Google+).
I think it's very possible, albeit not terribly likely, for us a few years down the road to say: "Facebook who?" Who would have thought that Myspace would have been unseated?
Thank you Captain O..
Every end has half a stick.
It is about QUALITY not QUANTITY. Myspace is for advertising. Facebook is for idiots.
Google+ isn't a distinct site, its a pervasive social layer integrated across a variety of Google services. Insofar as + is designed for stickiness at all, its designed to increase stickiness across the whole set of Google pages, not just the handful of + specific pages. (Though I'm not sure that + is designed for stickiness at all, as Google seems more to design to be a place people come back to rather than a place people stay.)
What about diaspora? I'd estimate around maybe 10 or 12...
...microseconds
Someone wanted to interview me and my colleague using a 3-way G+ video "hangout". Even though we all had Skype. After almost two hours of sign-ups, installs, fiddling, reboots, more fiddling, applying patches, being totally baffled by the interface and more fiddling, we finally agreed it wasn't ever going to work and we should try Skype. Guess what? It just worked.
As my first exposure to G+ it was a big fat zero. Not impressed. If Google want to attract people to the service, not only must it offer compelling features, but they have to work very reliably and be easy to use. None of the above apply right now.
My family and I are spread throughout the world. At first we used Skype to talk, but in recent versions they decided to remove the option to video chat with more than one person (unless you want to pay for the plus version) so we started looking into some other options, since most of us have Android devices we figured it would be easy enough to try out hangouts and so far they have worked great, people can connect from their browser or from their Android device and you get decent audio and video for at least four people in different parts of the world. I am a big fan.
Other than that I cannot say I use my G+ account much, though, however, I would say I use it as much as my FB account.
"I see undead people" Warcraft III - Necromancer
I'm not sure where the article gets their numbers, so I can't comment on that.
However, I will say that Google missed their real window in launching Google+. It seems Google just doesn't have the "knack" of advertising and seizing on opportunity, despite being an advertising company. Don't get me wrong, I like Google and all that. I just think they need to hire some PR folks, rather than letting the engineers run things.
IIRC, about a week after Google+ started in "invite-only beta", there was yet another security fiasco with Facebook. But this one was big, really huge. It was all over the news, it was all I heard about, and it seemed like everyone I knew was threatening to jump off Facebook because of it. I thought, "Someone at Google is watching this, and is going to open up the beta to everyone." But no one ever did.
That would have been the perfect time to really open up Google+, when everyone wanted an alternative to their ongoing security woes at Facebook. Never happened. Google continued their sloooooooooow rollout of the "invite-only" beta. Finally, months later, Google finally opened Google+ to everyone who wanted to join.
But it was too late. Google+ was a ghost town. Only a few people I knew were on Google+. The rest of my friends eventually "got over" whatever the Facebook security problem-of-the-day was, and stayed on Facebook. Since my friends are on Facebook, I stayed on Facebook.
For all that, Google+ does have a killer feature: Hangouts. I wish they'd made a big deal out of this when Google+ launched - like, showed it in action or something, ads on TV, whatever. It's like Skype or any other video chat, except you can have up to 10 people on at the same time (you + 9 others.) We have a hosted domain for work, and we use Hangouts all the time to talk to people at different locations within the organization. It's really freed us from having to share a single video conference room at our location.
I still have an Orkut account. Haven't looked at it in months! Now get off my lawn with your shiny new google+ accounts!
A good part of the reason is that Facebook has games on it that count as login time. Also, G+ has itself setup in a very smooth way that makes it easy to login, check all my shit quick, and move onto more important things. I like it way better than FB.
Perhaps the biggest pro for G+ is its users wasted only a fraction of their time (3 minutes) compared to their FB counterparts (6-7 hours).
"I use G+ and every month I get 7 hours of my life back."
I was using G+ very heavy until the whole blow up about us of real names at which point I stopped using for about a month and while I look at it from time to time.. I don't use it hardly. 3 Minutes a month sounds about right. The other major reason I'm not using G+ is I hit the limit on the # of users I could follow.. it got boring after that..
http://www.hawknest.com/
When did Google start selling personal information? Care to cite your source on that?
If google does not give my personal information to advertisers, then my personal information is neither sold, or rented.
Would you not agree?
With Google's new anti-privacy policy, they are explicitly reserving the right to take all that information and do whatever they want with it internally.
I have read Google's new privacy policy, and I don't remember seeing that. Care to be specific?
This is what I just read:
Heck, even Myspace users — many of whom are probably ghost accounts — suffered for eight minutes over the month.
G+ will take over automatically. Just give it time. We will soon see a generation of kids who wouldn't be caught dead on the same social network as their parents. Social networks have a finite lifespan and Facebook's is just about over, at least for the demographics who matter. Zuck knows this and that's why he's cashing out with an IPO while it's still worth something. In the not too distant future, Facebook will be for "old people" just like email is perceived to be now.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Ugh not this bullshit again....
Quoting the word or string does exactly the same thing. The + operator was redundant anyway.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The problem is that the measure treats Google+ as a "site" which is Google's social offering, but Google+ isn't a site and is only a part of Google's interlinked social offerings. Some aspects of G+ have their own pages, others are features that are integrated into a number of Google services, and a number of other Google services have social features tied to the same account/profile structure but which are neither part of the G+ branded pages nor referred to as G+ features.
How is that someplace Google is afraid to go? Discovery and organization of content posted elsewhere on the internet is pretty much Google's core competency, and integrating that with social profiles is exactly what Google is doing with the G+-linked social features in News and Search.
G+ started with WILD ENTHUSIASM from the techies. They were recruiting their friends at a fantastic rate, the software was marvellous, the engineers were right there and responsive ...
Then they started kicking people off for not having a WASPonym.
Facebook has a similar requirement, but they stop you from creating the account. They don't let you create it, then kick you off. Incidentally affecting every other Google service you're on, including your Android phone.
And of course techies use weird names, because they're annoying nerds. You can say these people were dicks for using stupid names, but it turned out that this argument didn't convince people to stick around. And they certainly weren't going to stop warning their friends off it.
Google+ got out its nuclear howitzer, locked target on its foot and pulled the trigger.
Man. All they had to do was not be Facebook. All they had to do was not be Facebook.
But I'm sure the newspaper and television ads will do wonders. And everyone active on G+ is loving it as much as the people on Buzz loved that.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I am living in the false security of thinking that my google services aren't too intertwined. I don't like that my gmail address is also the same as my youtube username.
Google+ to my knowledge sets a single name across all Google services. I don't like that. I also don't like the shitty name policy they had for a while, must be full, real name (sorry but fuck that shit)
I think Google+ has the potential to be vastly more invasive and evil than facebook, simply based on them knowing who you are on search, maps, youtube, blogger and so on,....... Not cool.
I've closed my facebook account and I don't plan to open a Google account.
Google is putting a lot of its weight behind Google plus I know that they are trying to push businesses to do it. I recently had to create a google+ for this website: Massage Therapy Longview, WA to help with placement. I don't know if google is trynig to get it to be more like linkedin, or what, but they sure are putting a lot of weight behind it.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
Google+ is essentially an open beta. Some of it's most critical features that will allow all the influencers and people that draw crowds to social networks are not yet implemented fully.
These articles are not really productive.
In 3-4 years you'll see a big shift I think. Facebook's only real feature at this point worth clinging to is the sheer number of people using it and some moderately well fleshed out metrics for businesses and such.
A very deep flaw in Google+ is that if you have already established either (or both) GMail and picasa accounts, then creating a Google+ account will cause your Google+ profile to become available to people that it was previously unavailable to. The way around this is to create a new (!) account on Google+ with a different user name to what you already use for other services.
I've seen managers at Google that have added me to their circles do exactly this - close down their existing Google+ profile (all of a sudden they realise that they have people in their Google+ circles that they don't know or following them) and create a new one that is not linked to their gmail/picasa accounts.
Google seems to understand that for youtube where you can use a separate youtube name/login to any other Google services you have.
Why can't they get it right everywhere?
Google+ and your Google profile need to be selectively associated with each Google service that you use. And that selection needs to be under your control.
This is why I like facebook - it isn't directly associated with twitter (unless I choose to post my tweets to facebook) nor youtube or anything else.
Myspace is a music streaming service, so duh. Comparing it to Google+ is like comparing Reddit to Netflix. Obviously, since people don't spend the time on Reddit that they do on Netflix, Reddit must totally suck.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Linus' posts are pretty much the only thing I read from Google+. A lot of my geekier friends do have G+ accounts but nobody ever posts anything.
it's fun to see MySpace being used as the meter stick of how bad something sucks...
I have two friends who work at Google. Don't really know what they do, but they are engineers, paid well, like their jobs.
I thought they'd find this story and discussion interesting, so I sent them a message via the method that I always use to talk to them, and where I always see them being the most active.
Facebook.
The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp. MySpace.com is owned by News Corp. Interesting - I'll let others draw their own conclusions, or lack thereof.
And make the g-d quotes do something useful again.
How exactly did removing all of that make Google better supposedly?
Your post was sent to this discussion 2 minutes after the story was posted.
wow! that is pretty quick. the timestamps are above in black and white. the guy must have been hitting his refresh button like my wife redials the doctor's office to try get an appointment.
i can see it now:
random chick: what do you do for fun?
gstoddart: oh, i try very hard to get first post on slashdot. wanna be my gf?
random chick: ummm.... i'm just gunna go over here now... by myself... n stuff... bye
troll at best, shill at worst.
Both MySpace and the Wall Street Journal are owned by Rupert Murdoch. They are definitely not above using one division to boost another division (how much has Fox News reported on the British phone hacking scandal?).
So take this report with the grain of salt it deserves.
I am officially gone from
Google is boasting that more than 90 million people have signed up for its Google+.
What would be more interesting is how many people are actually voluntarily signing up for a G+ account versus the accounts that are just autocreated for you for, for example, opening up a Gmail account. I'd be willing to bet a huge chunk of those accounts probably have seen no activity.
http://path.com/ might be perfect for you. It's very small, highly curated (people you would invite to a dinner party), and the tech bloggers love it. The only problem, of course, is that as a tech blogger, you're going to network with great content. If you are an average schmuck like me, you're going to get average content, because the good content people won't share. I'm not a fan of 1-to-1 networking Either many-to-1 or 1-to-many is the way to go, imo.
I8-D
I think the Google+ interface is far nicer than the interface at Facebook.
It was VERY HARD to get ANY of my FB friends to join me on Google+. Why should they? The were happy at their watering hole. It is a phenomenon as old as the internet itself. You have a popular forum, it has troubles, someone runs off and creates an alternative, it mostly gets ignored. Google is learning what Microsoft is learning. It is very hard to have an intentional success, especially by copying something that worked SPONTANEOUSLY, BY ACCIDENT for someone else.
Those kind of successes have to happen on their own and organically.
Then there were the comments from the Google CEO about the real name policy. He came off as nasty. After being told I would be forced to use my real name so he could make money off of my life I got a "fuck you" attitude toward the whole thing and stopped using Google+.
I'm not thrilled with their new Orwellian privacy policy either.
I use several Google services and I don't like living in fear of things from one showing up on another. With Facebook, I have the option of logging it out and leaving it alone. It is free standing.
I use too much of Google's stuff to do that easily.
People's main problem with Facebook is privacy and lack of control over their information. Google's CEO came out with some very aggressive sounding statements and policies about wanting to rape people's privacy the way Facebook is. So, why should people bother to use Google+?
Murdoch owns the WSJ, the "source" of this article. Don't you think it might be biased?
"myspace"
To me, the two services have completely different strengths. Facebook is the place you connect with people you know in real life. Family, people you went to school with but don't talk to anymore, that random hookup from last weekend, a place to stalk your ex... etc. Googe+ is a place to find new content and new ideas from like-minded (or not so like-minded) individuals that you respect or wish you knew in real life. Do they overlap? Of course, but Google is way more interested in keeping you signed in to your Google account and in their ecosystem wherever you may be to improve their core business, therefore I would argue that they don't need you to spend oodles of time in Google+... how about comparing how much time someone spends in Facebook to how much time someone spends logged in to all of Google's services... i.e. Gmail, Google+, Google Reader, YouTube, and the list goes on. That would be a much more interesting statistic.