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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.
Nice, now get rid of it and return the + operator to the search engine please.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
That can't be right. I used to use MySpace and it used to break all the time!
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
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
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.
<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 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.
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.)
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.
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?