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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."
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+!
Only reason I find to use a social network other than Facebook is privacy concerns. But lets be honest, Google is not the first company you look at when you ask yourself "who will take my privacy more seriously?"
Only alternative for social networking, in my eyes, is Twitter since (to my knowledge, they may be very good at hiding it) they only care about my posts and hash tags, not about tracking my every move in the web.
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
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?
Google isn't going to let its foray into the most profitable market... possibly ever (sales of personal information of others), just fade off into obscurity.
Can you provide a single example where Google has ever sold personal information to any third party ever? I get that privacy is important and Google might be pushing the boundaries on it, but spreading FUD like this isn't helping your cause.
My other sig is clever.
I agreed, there was no reason to use Google + - but I clicked in this week and people are actually posting and they are people I care about because my list isn't bloated.
So I'm going to start looking at plus now. I stopped using Facebook months ago.
The incentive for me is to have proper control of my privacy settings and sane sharing defaults. Zuckerberg's whole "everyone should share their whole lives with the world" mantra just does not fit with me and that is why Facebook does not fit with me. I had 200+ friends on facebook and only a tiny fraction of that on G+ - yet I spend way more time on G+ than I ever did on Facebook.
Seriously that might work. The journalist / media assumption is social media is only grannie auntie and the creep from middle school talking about nothing. Its even embedded into the language as "friend" and "friending". G+ seems to be going another direction into something like world wide/online/hobby clubs...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
My friends and I use G+, but not the way people use Facebook. It's more like an enhanced group email. We always used to have these email chains where someone would send out something interesting to everyone on the list, and people would just reply-all to that, either chatting or planning a party or whatever. Now we do the same thing on G+ since it makes it a bit easier. But I'd never "hang out" on the site (nor do I understand why people hang out on Facebook). I just log in from my phone, see if anything's happening, maybe fire off a reply, and log back off.
Yes! I've had a damn hard time searching for stuff with google lately because it ignores Anthony but the first three search words, so I have to order my search terms in different ways. It's almost as bad as using five search engines back in the day. While we're at it, can there be a check box to allow searching with punctuation? That's actually important to some searches.
Of course not, and neither does Facebook or they wouldn't be worth anything.
Which brings it all back to the merits of the two services to the end users. I'm sorry to say it, but Facebook is very well done and already has everyone you know, while G+ brings nothing to the table.
On rare occasions I pull G+ up, and it's the same thing... people I don't know saying crap I don't care about, and no obvious way to change that. I'd wager that's where the 3 minute figure comes from... people occasionally looking to see if it sucks less.
So why would I use it? And why isn't anyone at Google asking themselves that question?
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+.
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.
Can you explain what it is that causes such alarm about the new privacy policy (other than that the WSJ keeps writing negative stories about Google)?
As far as I can tell there are two primary privacy questions when someone is using a web service:
(1) What data do they collect? This is important because eve if they don't intend to do anything objectionable, they could still be forced to turn it over to a totalitarian government or someone could break in and steal it and you would then see the problems like you see in (2). The trouble with this is that it's a losing battle -- everybody collects everything they can get their hands on, so unless you want to be like Richard Stallman and read the internet by having people print it out on paper for you, there isn't much you can do. Plus, especially in the case of the totalitarian government, there is no way to actually verify that they aren't being forced to collect more data than they say they are. More importantly, this isn't the thing that changed in the new privacy policy, so if you were OK with this before then nothing has changed.
Which leads to:
(2) What do they use it for? The things to be worried about are that they provide it to insurance companies who use it to raise your rates or deny coverage, or provide it to governments who use it to silence dissidents, or that they're just loose with distributing it to anyone and it ends up in the hands of insurance companies and governments. But according to the privacy policy, that isn't what they're doing. They're using it internally, obviously to target ads. If you refrain from reading the ads, the effect on you is inconsequential. If you read them, you see ads that are somewhat more relevant... which doesn't seem like a particular cause for outrage.
So where is the path that leads to something bad happening? What terrible end result is enabled by the new privacy policy that was not possible under the old one?