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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."
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+!
G+ is used solely for following Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day when they have something to say beyond Twitter's 140 characters. They both have FB accounts now, however, so I imagine G+ will soon fade out of existence.
This reminds me of an image my boss has taped to her desk. (http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/social-media-explained-with-donuts-20120210/)
If you don't wan to click, it says:
Social Media Explained
Twitter: I'm eating a #donut
Facebook: I Like donuts
Foursquare: This is where I eat donuts
Instagram: Here's a vintage photo of my donut
YouTube: Here I am eating a donut
Pinterest: Here's a donut recipe
Last FM: Now Listening to "Donuts"
G+: I'm a Google employee who eats donuts.
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
You should add me on Google Wave then.
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 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.
Seconded here. There is 1/8th as much content on my G+ then there ever was on facebook. However that 1/8th is actually things that I either find amusing, actual posts by the friends I give a darn about (compared to 80% of my facebook contacts... which were mostly people I barely knew in person that looked me up and added me, and it was less work to add them then to explain why I don't want to add someone.
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.
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?
Google and Facebook are more about renting your personal information - as in, here, let us send this ad to someone whose personal information matches your desired profile. No way they're going to sell their core business. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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+.
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
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
Google+ is just not the same as Facebook and never will be. People don't go there as part of a social popularity contest. I just don't get all this bashing of Google+ about stuff that its users don't even care about. Next up people will bash Linux for not having as many users as Windows?
<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.
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.
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?