Slashdot Mirror
Online Loneliness At Google+
An anonymous reader writes "Google+ is a lonely place. At least according to a new study that paints the social networking site as a virtual tumbleweed town. Using information culled from the public timelines of 40,000 randomly selected members, data analysis firm RJMetrics found that the Google+ population, which currently numbers 170 million, is largely disengaged, with user activity rapidly decaying—at least when it comes to public posts. According to RJMetrics, 30 percent of first-time Google+ public posters don't post again. Of those who make five public posts, only 15 percent post again. The average time lapse between posts is 12 days, and RJMetrics cites a cohort analysis showing that members tend to make fewer public posts with each successive month. And the response to public posts on Google+ is extremely weak. The average post receives fewer than one reply, fewer than one '+1' (the equivalent to Facebook's 'Like'), and fewer than one re-share — basically most posts in the study did not garner any response."
Yeah. We know. We can browse the site too.
Please bring back the "share" feature internal to Google Reader
why should I share my obsession with drugs with my potential employer?
privacy is the thing
Participation means bandwidth. They just want your information, they could care less how often you post.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
I use google + daily, always open in a tab.
And each time i go look at the tab, there's something new up on my stream.
So I guess some people do post. If you're not following anyone, no wonder it seems barren.
I think it might be the reason that critical mass wasn't achieved. I was really hoping that this would trump facebook.
Google + was seen as a "Facebook that isn't Facebook", so sure, I made an account and looked around.
But then I remembered something, it's still a pointlessly boring social media site, and abandoned it.
I don't use any of these social media products, but isn't it possible that the QUALITY of Google + posts are better? If I were reading stuff like this, I'd much rather have a few interesting things to read, than a lot of garbage.
I don't respond to AC's.
The main problem, in my opinion, is that it looks inactive no matter what.
The ability to use circles means the ability to not hear every single one of your friends every single minute. Especially those annoying ones that say something every minute. But by not having those, it looks like there are less people using it.
That said, I don't have a facebook account and I only have a G+ one because I tested it at the start and couldn't be bothered deleting it.
On the other hand, being on 4chan sometimes, some of the boards would really look a lot more empty if you removed the bothersome reoccuring replies (like rolls). Thus maybe making them look abandoned.
Most people don't post publicly, if that is your only gauge of success, it will show up as not being that active. That's the wonderful this about circles
It's probably still got more users than Diaspora*
(Ducks)
Summation 2
My local circle of friends went in heavily for Google+ as soon as it opened. Two of them actually cancelled their Facebook accounts in favor of having only Google+, although tellingly, one of those has since reopened his FB account and started using it on a regular basis again; the other one is still a Google+ diehard, but did reopen an "events-only" FB account because he was tired of getting left out of event invitations.
I started a thread on G+ recently asking my circles if they were still getting value from G+, and the general consensus was that people want it to work, like the features, but just aren't seeing the social interaction that would make it viable. A lot of people reported that they use it primarily as a blog aggregator. This has been my experience as well, and I'm probably a heavier G+ user than most.
I think that the invite-only rollout was probably a misstep, as was not allowing business accounts for the first several months. Lack of event integration is also a problem.
Google+ has poor integration with other social mediaapps. Foursquare, Yelp, Twitter, instagram, Pinterest, Flipboard. All these share with each other or at least twitter and facebook. Google+ isn't even an option, and you have to manually copy or create updates on it, which is annoying.
Every time I mention to my social network of 200 that Google+ is dead or dying, I get the same 5 people who say it isn't and also happen to be the only 5 people in my circles who share anything.
The key here is the word "average." Sure, most users who heard about it will login once, make a post, then go back to Facebook for Farmville to feed their cattle. I'm more interested if there are small groups of people who make posts, because if so Google has a core group of users that they can grow from. And, of course, as TFA points out, the whole point of G+ was the privacy aspect, which they cannot see (I, for one, would almost never post outside some circle: I would use Facebook if I was interested in that kind of thing).
Note: I don't really use G+ or Facebook, although I have accounts on both. I do, however, occassionally see people posting interesting stuff (mainly pictures) on G+, since it ties into my email, and I don't mind it. I had to disable Facebook from sending me emails, since there was so much crap. And it still won't stop. Every email notification option I can find is turned off, and some still get sent. That is why I hate Facebook, more than anything else. They don't respect the users settings, obviously (so I don't expect them to respect privacy settings, either).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
1) You can put your whole life online and it still doesn't mean you're famous.
2) People you know will post snarky crap on your page and shrug their shoulder when you meet them face to face.
3) Everything you've ever been told to safegaurd your privacy is out the window at Facebook. If you don't post it, someone you know already posted about you.
4) A website is automatically uncool the moment your parents join.
5) Facebook is just an ugly background away from being Myspace.
I haven't made a single public post IIRC on G+. Public posts don't interest me, posts to people I know and with whom I share common interests do. It takes a while to get the hang of it but it works quite well. And... No, I have never had a facebook account.
Google+ just didn't make it out of the gate fast enough to get the support from those already attached to Facebook. Because of that, people who did sign up with Google+ didn't have the same support from those they wanted to communicate with so (probably) stuck with Facebook for its user base. Unless Google does something to get users to switch en masse, there's not much they can do about it. You can't expect users to post on both sites and, I'm assuming, anyone that is gung-ho about social networking has been Facebook-whoring for quite a while now and has no intention of starting over.
This is all aside from social networking being a complete waste of time (my opinion, anyway...).
-SaNo
There's a reason those of us that switched did so. If they turned Google+ into another facebook I'd leave. I don't want to be part of a virtual hen-hizzy where everyone is telling me the size of their poop every morning. When I have an update on Google+ I know it's work looking at... where-as with facebook I was so flooded with nonsense I couldn't stand it anymore and deleted my account.
What we need is a protocol for truly distributed social network, where each one can run his own server and have complete control of his/her data.
Listen to that google and work towards that. We don't need another facebook.
Sometimes I feel like the reason Google built Google+ is so they could harvest everyone's personal information. They don't actually care if people use it or not, they now know who I am, and can sell that to advertisers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I find that Google posters are more technically incline. Most of the people I circle are tech types or something else I find cool. I've also noticed that most people post to circles and not public. I will see people commenting on posts, but when I click their profile, they are sharing nothing.
My guess this has to do with them being more technical. Companies and everyone else are searching the Internet to see what you do online. If you don't share your post with them, they can't see it.
As for G+ being dead. I don't see it. G+ only allows 500 comments per post and I see maxed out post comments quite often. (very annoying Google, fix it!)
I suppose if you are an outsider looking in, it could look like a ghost town. Especially if you are choosing random people to follow. A lot of random G+ers don't want you seeing what they are posting.
I haven't signed up yet. Why should I when, if I want that sort of interaction, I use facebook (I don't, my account is not deleted, but it's disabled, and all my cookies deleted). How many more users are there on facebook - and all constantly using and posting, I don't get why anyone thinks they'd all suddenly just jump ship to G+ when facebook is doing what they want. It doesn't even matter if G+ is better... facebook is good enough (apparently) and everyone is already there.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I've only been censored in Facebook
Indeed, I stopped using Google+ after they censored Pioneer plaques.
The study says they could only look at public posts. I rarely post publicly and instead use circles to limit who can see what I post. While many of the people I follow on G+ are silent (or at least they don't publish to me), so are most of the people on Facebook. I follow a comparable number of people on G+ and Facebook and my G+ feed is just as busy. I don't see how a study like this can draw any meaningful conclusions from their methodology.
I use it to follow companies and not get marketed to death like Facebook. It does what I need in that I can get quick information from various vendors. No need to google+ something or anything else.
I did not know they did that. Can you give example posts that were censored?
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
Maybe I'm getting old but I didn't see anything particularly special about Facebook. I'd expected them to go the way of myspace a while ago. As twisted as the company is, they do continue to innovate and respond. They may not be wholesome changes, but they're damn good at catering to the vapid and trivial BS that drives the interests of people that would otherwise be watching reality TV.
They're also pretty good at connecting families. My grandparents fricking LOVE facebook. Lets them find their old friends that are still alive, and laugh smugly and gossip about the ones that they outlived.
See, that's the problem with Google+. It's too good, and promotes good activities. Unfortunately that audience is too small to compete. Facebook is cesspool of human drama and vice, which is why it's so popular.
The large majority of the people in my circles with whom I keep active contact with, post almost exclusively Limited, as do I.
Frankly, those who post exclusively Public seem a bit like show-offs and/or "social media consultants" (or "experts"), and who wants to stay in touch with such people?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
If you think FB has privacy issues now.... Google+ may have a lot of new accounts after the FB IPO* hits. Not that Google is any better privacy-wise, but people wanting to share their entire life online may have to choose the lesser of two evils.
* http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/technology&id=8663072
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Every single one of these articles is completely without merit. They all poll Google+ for public information. Guess what, the majority of users on G+ do not post publicly, that is why they choose to be there instead of Facebook. I know personally I moved over to G+ with an already formed circle of Twitter friends. The vast majority of us only end up sharing among the 500 or so members of that loose community. But within that group, the discussion is constant. There are tons of these loosely affiliated circles on the service.
The type of user attracted to Google+ generally is someone looking to discuss things, not necessarily vapidly post about what they had for dinner. It is a different dynamic, and as such needs a different metric to determine participation. Then again at the end of the day I am completely happy with Quality over Quantity.
It doesn't suck. I fond it to be far cleaner, easier to use and easier to organize.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it kicks the shit out of anything else I know of right now.
picture an event that takes 5 months of work by teams scattered over 4 cities. Google+ is a giant help. the hangouts allow face to face meeting combined with screen sharing. the information being built by google earth I can turn around and drop into the circle that is doing the work.
it's actually a great group solution. something that facebook sucks at.
taz
Apparently there are now enough Google Plus posts (somewhere, I guess) that you can start doing statistical analysis on them.
I've managed to establish "circles" on Google+ featuring people who post frequently - I have a "science" circle (not one I created but one adopted from someone else) that is very busy. The difference with facebook is that I don't know any of these people personally. The people I do know personally who I've connected with, as the study suggests, simply don't use it other that opening an account and posting a couple of times. So I'm using it more like twitter right now (where I also don't personally know the vast majority of my followers/followees), which isn't a bad thing.
So I'm not convinced it's a complete failure yet - my own use is slowly increasing. But it's certainly true that it is no real threat to facebook at the moment. Too much critical mass over there to get most people to switch.
In other words, the network effect was re-discovered. I'd love to use G+, but everyone I know is on Facebook. And since I'm too lazy to post things twice and visit two different sites for the same purpose, I stick to Facebook.
Here's what would spur the adoption of G+: Google needs to develop a social network aggregator, where G+ is just one of the networks. Have it pull posts from all your networks, and allow you to cross-post to every network you want. Google needs to realize that it lost this battle, and is staring at the possibility of losing the war. Which means that it cannot simply push G+ accounts to everyone who signs up with any Google service, but it needs to position itself as the complete newcomer who has to play nice with the existing networks. The main trouble could be the TOS for using APIs, but I'm sure that the basic 24 hours storage rule should allow Google to at least have it pull relevant data and display it at the time of request.
There is something that kinda works like it, but doesn't really have the interface I would look for (full disclosure - the people working on it are good friends): http://www.socxs.com/.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Guess the study did not take the photographers into consideration.
So imagine my surprise when Google started suspending account that were not related to a real person. Though I did set up a Google+ account, I have been too worried about losing my Google Docs accounts to actually do anything on Google+. It seems from online posting that one Google gets on your case you are screwed.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I agree,
I've completely ditched facebook, but keep it active just in case.. I've checked it maybe 4 times in the last year.
Through Google+ whats hot, I see all kinds of awesome content which my facebook friends usually see a few days later through the grapevine.
Hangouts are simply awesome (although Google should merge the Google Chat and hangouts.. why have 2 tools that are the same but different)
Integrating Docs into it, Amazing.
Auto upload of Photos, and Photo editing tools, Also Amazing.
Its got everything I want out of a Social Network.. except the Social part of it.. which kinda sucks.
I just want everyone to jump ship to G+ becuase then it really would be better than facebook.
As pointed out above the event integration needs to happen (which is strange because google calendar exists)
But unfortunately the people are sticking to facebook. I tried to see if by me stopping using facebook whether my friends would at least try Google plus to see what im up to.. but alas.. all I succeeded in doing was making my friends think I dont like them anymore because I dont reply to their messages or posts.
Sigh
Exactly, and Google+ isn't even up to Facebook. It's worse than that and has much less features. It seems like they just tried to copy Facebook and did a half-assed job at it. Who the hell at Google thought this was a good idea? Oh I know. They thought they could leverage their search engine and gmail to force users to the service, with things like automatic signups pushing all that crap to the search. Google is really going downhill.
Just search "Google+ censored" on Google+. I'm against any censorship, therefore I refuse to use Google+.
Google+ is like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense; it doesn't know it's dead yet.
(hat tip to whoever said it here not long after it launched)
I really hate the idea that people can add me to their circles without me approving it and the only way to avoid it is by blocking that person. Why would I want to block a person just because I don't want them to be "connected" on G+?
And the lack of better photo organizing turns me off too.
If Google weren't acting so evil lately, I'd probably be there. I don't see that they are any better than Facebook--especially since they are reading all my emails.
I'm hoping to shift to Diaspora someday.
It's like using Facebook lite, and while I think many people enjoy that concept in itself it does render the purpose of G+ redundant as the "original" is a swirling suckhole of egos, people saying stupid stuff and games your mom plays (y'know the people who actually use Facebook every waking moment).
Other things that kinda sorta make it worse:
-User Interface: Google used to have decent GUI but last couple years have shown some serious ineptitude. G+ isn't just barren, it LOOKS barren too.
-Lack of Anonymity, Google wants to tie you into all their services through G+, if I want one of my GMail accounts to connect to G+ I will go out of my way to do it, but they seem insistent on shoving a giant button everywhere they can to try to connect accounts.
So, in short, G+ has been mostly useless, pushy and ugly, everything I want in a piece of software.
Compared to other social networks sites I have been using I have never seen this amount of interactions between users.
The difference here is that you start to talk to people you don't know. Whn I started on G+ none of my friends there on G+, but instead I started to talk with people I never seen or met before.
Today I have these stats from G+:
Posts 631
Comments 5777
+1's 1623
Reshares 193
Compared to FB there the same type of posts didn't generate anything at all.
who shot the cat in the hat to experiment is insane
Google+ is a good place if you know what you are looking for. I like to follow nerds and it just about seems like the "right medium" for that. Family, friends tend to hang around in FB. I see G+ & FB as orthogonal entities catering to different social ecosystems.
second AC I read that says this. I'd be cool if you provided examples so as to validate your anonymous claims a bit better.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
I remember back in the olden days (2006 ish) when there was a mad rush from MySpace to Facebook. It almost felt dirty to stay on MySpace. I didn't really know why it was happening, since MySpace was a lot more customizeable, which should have been great for all the narcissists who live for "social networking". Well, that was back when social networking was less entrenched and still a mere toy. We were still using evite for parties and myspace for social. Facebook has dug in a lot deeper now; people can't just all of a sudden decide to use another network. They have (usually hundreds) huge numbers of contacts, that's where they get their party invitations, all their family info, trade photos, etc. Most aren't tech savvy, so learning a new site is daunting. It's going to take a lot more than just a similar website to pull them off en masse to another service. It's going to take a huge game changer and google+ was never that game changer. My puny brain can't think of what could replace Facebook, but I don't think it exists yet.
Google Plus+ the Zune of Social Media.
There is a really popular product out there, the big company comes in much to late in the game, offers a product that isn't that much better, and not much cheaper. In hopes that you big name will oust the already well known name.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The whole premise of G+ is that it's built around private sharing with your circles. There's a lot of public sharing, sure -- but it's INTENDED to be private. That was the whole selling point for why people chose to use it over Facebook. My G+ feed is constantly being updated in a very lively manner with both public and limited posts by a variety of people.
The study is based on a flawed premise. They should find some other metric aside from "public posts" for determining how engaged the userbase is.
In social networking, as with many things, there can be only one premier service. Sure, there can be products which cater to a special niche, or as an alternate, but few people are going to keep two Facebook like sites going at once. Google+ offers no real compelling reason to leave the #1 player, Facebook, for the majority of users (hint: if you're reading slashdot, you're not one of those people).
Until everyone moves, nobody will. Google was jerking off with Wave and Buzz while Facebook was getting everybody and their brother on. Most people just want a social site, and Google tried to make it "more" and didn't realize that my mother, and the 13 year old kid down the street don't want "more."
Google is too late to the party, and there's too much momentum right now. In 3-4 years, if facebook starts to decline (as MySpace did), then there will be an opportunity again. Right now, though, I think it's Facebook's market to keep or screw up and it's going be difficult and take a long time to make enough people switch so that it gains momentum.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
FOREVER ALONE meme...
Sounds like you've never been using Google+
I was already annoyed with Google's obvious profiling tricks; apparently harvesting my gmail to display advertising. When I got duped into associating my YouTube account with my Google account (*now* I understand), I was seeing people in my gmail senders lists showing up as recommended movies. I'm trying to walk back my Google dependence, not add a new data mining node on my TIA profile.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
That's why I post on Slashdot. I know I can talk about XXXXXXX, XXX XXXXXX and XXXXX without any worry of censorship.
Ha, I can't believe they censor bare breasts. What else do they censor?
There must be some self righteous religious nut at the helm of that sinking ship.
Porn? Political censorship? What?
How can I nuke my G+ account? I searched for the option some days ago but couldn't really find it.
The only time I check Google+ is when I read a story how nobody uses it. Then again, the only time I check facebook is if I've been told I've been invited to something and should check the details on facebook.
Well, when people tell me that nobody uses Google+, I'm quick to point out that's the single best feature about it.
I've always hated being inundated by inane posts, having difficulty finding the signal among all the noise. Plus, everybody who found out your name suddenly wanted to be your facebook friend. I didn't have a public searchable profile, but people I met would ask, "do you have a facebook account?" and I couldn't just flat out lie because somebody else who was in my list of friends would nearby and chime in, "yes, sure he does." Then I'd be put in the situation where I either add the person to my list of faux friends to add further noise the updates I see or tell them, "I don't want to add you" which is seen as offensive.
In Google+, I post my pictures and stuff, share it with the people who are interested in seeing them, and with nobody else. It's not active, in your face, "this is what where I had dinner last night" type posts, because I don't think anybody gives a shit where I had dinner last night. However, when I talk to someone in person that I went on a hiking trip someplace interesting, and they ask me if I have any pictures, I can tell them, "I'll send you a link to the album if you're interested." People also share things with me, but they're not posting as actively as people usually post on facebook, so I only get important updates. Signal to noise ratio is great...and if Google+ suddenly turned as popular as facebook, it would immediately turn to crap, so I hope it never does.
Their real name policy does bother me, but I tolerate it because the only people I ever share stuff with know my real name anyway.
I found some vague claim of swear words being censored. But I did not find any examples. Can someone share any experience?
If you're not having a good time on Google+, then you're doing it wrong. Click on the explore button on the left, post to a few threads that you find interesting, and I've ended up with over 100 people following my posts, about a third of them I actually know. I don't spam a lot of my own posts, I put up stuff I do that I enjoy, and might post original content or share something once every 3 days. Still it's not a ghost town if you bother to look for someone you think does cool stuff and just put them in a followers circle so you see their public posts on your stream. If you're a geek I recommend Wil Wheaton, and Felicia Day. Leo LaPorte is good too, but he posts less than I do, which is surprising since he came out as a big supporter of G+ and he's a content author by trade. I also follow Wired Magazine, and Marissa Mayer. None of which give me more than I can keep up with, but that doesn't mean I read all of it either.
Google+ is now Ponies+.
A small group of friends from FB decided to try G+, and the consensus was "why change?" It was an awesomely large sample of 10 people, so no big deal, but none of us do anything but chat to each other. No FB games are any of that other frivolous stuff; half don't even put up status posts. And if we want to voice chat we just hit Skype. There was no incentive to switch our SOP to something that didn't offer anything special.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I have about three "personal" friends that I know that actually use Google+. That includes my wife. On the other hand, I communicate with another 400+ people on Google+ on a daily basis that I have never meet but share the same interests. I constantly get excellent information and feedback from most of them. I don't even post a lot of stuff but I get moire feedback than I did on Facebook. As a matter of fact, I get "too many" great responses from people... weird.
You have to treat it like Myspace (sorry I said that...). Just go in and add a bunch of people that have similar interests, open up your posts to the public, and jump in and contribute. You get what you put in. If you think that you'll be able to post some "useless" status update and have 20 people click the "like" button then maybe you should stick to Facebook.
I looked at G+ when it first came out, I was actively looking for an alternative to Facebook, something which didn't keep jerking around with privacy settings which I had already locked down 5 times. I was hoping G+ was going to be that system.
I was just about to sign up when stories of people getting banned from G+ because their names weren't real and because G+ was connected to their standard Google Account, also losing access to GMail etc.
I use GMail as my primary contact address, I decided I didn't want the hassle which could be caused if anything happened to that account so I didn't sign up and I just couldn't be bothered to create yet another account just to try out G+ so that was the end of the experiment for me.
Worse, for Google at least, was that as a result of this I took stock of all the services I was using and realized that a hell of a lot of my online presence was tied to Google in one form or another and if anything happened to my account it would be a nightmare trying to get everything working again. e.g. Bank login details, forum names, IRL social groups were all associated with my GMail account.
As a result, I moved the blog from Blogger to wordpress using my own domain name, which also provides my email address for all personal contacts so GMail isn't getting used for that anymore. I still use GMail for commercial contacts but slowly reducing my reliance on GMail for that as well.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Google+ is like the new club that just opened down the street, but few people go there because everyone is still going to the First club that they've been frequenting for years.
And that original club's popularity is unlikely to change, since popularity is self-reinforcing (people want to hang with other people).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Just go to G+, click on "What's Hot" and look at all the activity. There really is a lot of activity going on, just not necessarily the same interests that most people have.
I personally quite enjoy Google+. I write there about once or twice a week on average and I write about things that I feel are worth saying and I always write in English so as for my thoughts to be internationally readable. The site is clean and useable, though I still think the layout needs some more work. Facebook on the other hand.... well, I write there only like once or twice every two-three months and even then only as a response to something; Facebook is cluttered, annoying, and I have relegated it for only the irrelevant, meaningless flutter that my so-called 'friends' like to share. I tend to use Google+ more like an interactive blog than a chatting- or trend-watching-platform, so perhaps that explains why I like it so much better. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Google+ suits me better than anything else I've found so far.
That said, I also have to agree with the sentiment that Google+ feels like a rather empty place. I still haven't found anything worth following, for example, and many of the entities I might actually care to follow aren't there. I can understand why, though: Facebook attracts people with short attention-spans, people who like to follow trends and what others do and say, and people who can be rather easily swayed, whereas Google+ seems to attract people with more pronounced individual traits. In other words, Facebook attracts exactly the kind of people companies love. This should obviously not be seen as a failure on Google+'s part -- something so many seem to imply -- but instead as a success in attracting entirely different kind of people; how can it be a failure when you are successfully attracting people who aren't attracted to other offerings?
I like having an anti-social network
I wonder who funded this particular study. ;-)
I switched from Facebook to Google+, and I use it almost exclusively now. The population is smaller, but the discussions are better. On Facebook, I'm linked to personal friends, on Google+, I'm linked to people all over based on common interests. I like G+ better.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I only keep it so I can get unlimited photo storage instead of the paltry amount they give you with Picasa web albums.
Sounds like you can't provide any actual evidence and proceed to denigrate Google based on spurious and maybe even intentional misinformation.
G+ attempts to solve a problem that has already been solved. The solution to maintaining different "circles" evolved into having different accounts. This was hindered for a short time by a lack of cross-posting but that was quickly solved by a set of APIs and app makers like TweetDeck. Personally, I have my family and majority of friends on FB, core friends and more comedy-driven people on twitter. I know I can crack certain snarky jokes on twitter that would offend my 2nd cousins and a high school friend. Those are the only 2 circles I need right now but if I need more, I can make a separate account. As it is, I cross-post my status updates, tweet snarky comments, facebook post family-friendly stuff, and on rare occasion G+ post techy things that weren't snarky. That results in about one post a month to G+ and daily posts to the others. I get the feeling this is a similar setup to many users of social media.
If our social lives are in either one circle or on an app which manages our circles, we have no need of G+. Communities don't move overnight. They shrink over time as their members slowly move from one pasture to a slightly greener one. G+ may be slightly greener but if travel there is difficult and I don't know anyone there, every time I head home for a "friend fix" I'm going to be tempted to never return. G+ needs to build a highway soon. Implement Twitter and FB accounts as "external circles" using the existing APIs. Let me make G+ my home while still talking to my existing circles. Let the external circles dwindle as everyone except our parents slowly move over to G+ but let us still talk to our parents. Until that happens, G+, your community will stagnate.
So Facebook is the social network and Google+ is the anti-social network? No wonder I like G+ better ;)
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
There are three major problems:
1) Google+ was just not designed for real people with messy social relationships that can't be easily categorized.
2) Like most of Google products, Google+ has an odd clinical feel about it. Things like using a math equation (+1) instead of an ordinary word like "Like" or "Thumbs Up:. There are dozens of similar problems. It doesn't matter for search, which can be utilitarian, but it doesn't go well with social stuff.
3) People actually subconsciously prefer a company that is dedicated that social networking, like FaceBook or MySpace, than a company that is doing it on the side, like Microsoft or Google.
Here is a recent blog post discussing 1 & 2:
http://dvronay.blogspot.com/2012/04/why-google-is-still-not-working-for.html
They censor any nudity Taliban-style, up to banning users who post too much nudity.
Um, no. We're not here to do your own research to prove your own fucking point. Try again.
This other AC is correct... I subscribe to a photographer who maybe a little militant atheist, and frequently posts about issues regarding homosexuality (though it is far from clear to me that he is actually gay). None of his photos are in anyway porn, but do occasionally show a boob or two. But mostly the complaints roll in for his religion bashing comments. And he has had lots of problems with Google censoring his posts because of this. Brandon Partridge is the photographer, he has been pretty public about his misgivings with Google, although I haven't heard of any problems for a few months. But it was definitely an ongoing thing with him for several months.
Posting as AC just cause I don't know how many people are actually following Brandon.
There was great buzz when it first went online, but they actively kept folks from signing up without an invite for a couple months. I tried to check it out, but was rejected, as were many folks I suspect. Google didn't want me, why go back?
Google has done this before too. I just lose interest if they come out with a half finished Beta service, which they have a track record of then not following through with. Apple has this side of things mostly down, zip your lips until you ship. With little Apple generates over-inflated expectations and mostly well executed non-Beta products at launch you have a lot less chance of "Meh" in the marketplace.
From my understanding, they would only be able to follow your public posts unless you put them in a circle and then share with that circle. If you never post publicly, they wouldn't see very much.
One social network will always have the lion's share, the exclusivity ensures it. The only question is which one.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They also need to add sub-circles and the ability to edit permissions after the fact.
No, it is a good "product", and has features that top both facebook and twitter, but has some flaws that result in Stream overload, thus leading to the article's comments about not many people getting responses for public posts.
And the whole "Ghost Town" meme is such bullshit. Look, it's hardly a ghost town. My stream has tons of stuff in it today. The only "ghost" part is that mostly it's from people I don't know personally.
G+ is functioning more like an advanced version of Twitter. You "follow" lots of people by putting them in your circles. They post "publicly" and it shows in your stream. You get a ton of posts in your stream. You can comment on them and the poster sometimes comments back or you have a discussion with other commenters. Never could do this effectively on Twitter. But mostly it's working for larger names, bloggers, etc. William Shatner posted today that he has 1.4 million followers, and there were 74 comments to that post (Vic Gundotra of Google being the first poster).
So in a nut shell, the big names get lots of viewers and commenters. But yes, if I post I'm competing with a lot of big names and lots of posts for attention. That is why few people get +1s or comments on their posts. You have to really develop a following of dedicated readers.
If I post to a select group of friends, or a circle, they will not get notified unless I mention them by name or post just to them (and still have to have the right settings for this). And if they don't get notified then my post risks getting lost in the flood of their stream.
Anyway, the point of all this, is that there are some issues with the design of posts/circles/notifications that have lead to the exact condition we are seeing. I think some of these can be fixed, maybe not all.
Oh, also, Google+ Hangouts rock, so just use it for that if nothing else.
How do you expect to find examples of something that was censored(removed)? I've seen quite a few G+ accounts blocked by Google because of posts with nudity, e.g. Moan Lisa.
For multiple reasons (interface, lack of clutter, fewer ads, etc) but I don't use it much since not many other people use it. I pretty only use FB to see if anyone else posted anything interesting....since that almost never happens I only look at FB once a month or less. Generally I think FB is being used less as well and of the people I know about 90% come either from 5 or so people who seem to have no real life or companies putting up ad posts.
Would most social media sites even allow Google+ to hook into their sites to pull information?
Your friends are a sad bunch if they think you not replying to them in Facebook means that you don't like them anymore.
Seems like the people dumping on Google Plus are the same people who hate Facebook. That is, they didn't use google plus much before and didn't want to like the site before they ever typed in the URL.
So...there is absolutely NO surprise that people who hate social media websites hate google plus. Big deal. Move on.
It's hard to see why anyone would care about Google+. Their entire pitch is "better privacy than Facebook", which isn't a great pitch. Facebook will probably surpassed eventually by a new SN company, but it will be one that will be advertised as "cool" not "discrete".
Cool factor aside, Google+ objectively has worse privacy than Facebook. Anyone that cares enough about privacy to avoid Facebook, will generally avoid all forms of social networking and also take a very dim view of Google in general. It's not what the company does or doesn't do that's an issue, it's what it could potentially do. Having a search history tied to a social profile is a huge problem. No entity no matter how benign can be entrusted with that much information.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
I'm still rather peeved at all of the changes to gmail. Since they announced that they wanted to force changes to the gmail UI, I stopped using g+, started to use duckduckgo, and blocked as many google scripts and sites as I possibly could. Once I find a gmail alternative, they can basically kiss me and my family good bye.
Using information culled from the public timelines of 40,000 randomly selected members...
Google deserves this sort of report given that 95%+ of their Google+ "members" were effectively forced into the system when they made Google Accounts require a Google+ profile.
Of course there is little activity among this group... most of them don't actually use Google+.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Maybe if I'd been on Facebook it'd be different, but coming from deviantART, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal, YahooGroups before that, and Usenet before that? Google+ is awkward, and I'm not getting much out of it other than reading Wil Wheaton's and a few other people's posts. I'm not finding much sense of community there.
I am nudist and my account was suspended few weeks ago. Actually, many users have had their accounts suspended over nudity and clearly Google does not accept nudists in Google+ community. I feel Google+ violated my civil rights, but I can't do anything about it.
I never implied that it was a bad product. Just a poorly timed product that didn't differentiate from its competitors
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So lonely, people don't even bother to study it.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
If your only check for public posts and only post public, you're doing it wrong.
I really don't get the anti-Google vibes. Why would people that care about privacy take a worse view of Google than of Facebook? Google has never sold the data they collected or turned over to nasty governments anything that they were not forced to. And that is post-IPO. Imagine what Facebook is going to be like privacy-wise in a few years time, once they realise that they actually need to make a profit?
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Their TOS allows for it. There's no restriction along the lines of "You can't do it if your name is Google, or if you have more than $1B in revenue and a competing social network." There ARE storage restrictions though: for one, you can't actually replicate the entire site and store it somewhere outside of FB servers. You're only allowed to cache things for 24 hours.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The reason most first time public posters never post publicly again!
Seriously, I shared 1 public post from Joel Spolsky publicly months ago about SOPA/PIPA. Since that day, I've had 10-15 spammers a day add me to their circles. While it doesn't directly affect me, since G+ supports the 1 way relationship, unlike Facebook, which I consider a cool feature, the constant barrage of notifications made sure I'd *NEVER* share anything publicly again. How do I know they're spammers? Simple, if you're following 5-10K people, and less than 100 are following you, you're probably a spammer. Twitter taught us this. Interestingly enough though, of all the posts I've made on twitter, of which every single one is public, I've had less than 10 spammers add me over the past 2-3 years. G+ on the other hand had me sifting through >250 notifications in a month, and even though that post was several months ago (around the blackout day in January), I still get them, though it is down to a manageable number of just a few a week now.
So no, I'll never post publicly again on G+. And, contrary to popular belief, many of us geeks have a lot of friends that aren't geeks. Only my geek friends have migrated to G+, and of those really only the ones that feel the need to be superior to the masses on Facebook. The others are either on both now, or on neither if they weren't on FB before. I do like G+ better than FB, but I like XMPP better than MSN and Google Wave (before it died) better than e-mail. Still, social things require being where the people are, so XMPP only helps now thanks to Google Talk, and I still have MSN, AIM, and ICQ (all through Trillian), and Wave is dead.
And the ability to make posts that are restricted from particular circles. It's ridiculous that you can specify exactly which circles and individuals you DO want to see a post but you can't specify who you DON'T want to see a post. Seems like pretty obvious functionality.
By comparing something to Zune, you immediately relegate it to the absolute bottom of the barrel in quality.
So you did imply it was a bad product.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Well, when people tell me that nobody uses Google+, I'm quick to point out that's the single best feature about it.
I strongly disagree! The best feature is that it's NOT owned by that Zuckerberg prick. The second best feature is that NO ONE uses it.
I think a decentralised social network where every computer is also a server, and you have full control over your media (not by giving it to a 3rd part), will be the next big thing. I mean, I've been through several social media sites. Facebook the shortest. Currently on G+. It's just one more stream -- Another pane along side the various others (email / usenet, IRC, etc) on my 2nd screen's 3rd desktop...
XBL has the best social online service for consoles... Diaspora is an Abortion on Rails, There's a PHP fork (this is an improvement?!); Linux / Mac lack the eyballs; However, MS actually has the market share to pull it off on the desktop, but they always make horrible UI decisions... Eg:
Searching "index of C:\" on Google was clunky to say the least -- I really think their experimental social network "Firewall Disabled by Default" was just too far ahead of its time. Come to think of it, FDD shared many similarities with G+: Funky name, Tied in with Google Search, Animated GIFs, Under publicised except to a nich nerd market...
And since I'm too lazy to post things twice and visit two different sites for the same purpose, I stick to Facebook.
For me, it happened that everyone I was friends with on Facebook were my actual close friends and family members. Before Facebook added the 'subscribers' feature (post-G+), I wouldn't have added strangers as my "friends" on Facebook, and I get annoyed "like"ing brand pages and the like because I don't want to participate in advertising for the brand on my own feed. So it turned out that Facebook was, for me, just a place for friends and family to keep in touch.
With G+, I was far more indiscriminate with my choices of who to circle, so I ended up actually seeking out people that wrote interesting content. I still post on Facebook occasionally, but I post completely different things there than I do on G+, and I read completely different things there than on G+. I personally don't see that as a bad thing. Some of my family have signed up to G+, and I have them in circles, but few post there compared to Facebook, and I'm actually fine with that.
A success story for G+ doesn't have to involve the destruction of Facebook.
Sorry, its still a ghost town.
In all honesty, I like G+, and if it came around before FB, I would probably use it since I use a lot of Google services, but they just came along in the game too late and messed up opening to the public. I have 800 (legit) friends on fb, why would I bother them to migrate everything to G+ when FB works well enough?
tl;dr - Its a ghost town.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
I'm not really into social networks but I'm subscribed to some things on Google+ related to development, games and other stuff and there is plenty of content. It may well be less than Facebook but it's certainly no "ghost town". I also think as far as social networks go, it has a nice user interface especially since it integrates into other Google services.
Facebook is a mile wide but an inch deep. It's basically a whiny high school full of drama queens that happens to have half a billion people enrolled. As others have posted here already, Google+ actually delivers some substance. It's where smart people go.
The way I like to say it is: Google+ is where Facebook users go when they grow up.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Here's G+'s failing (yeah, I know. Ok, maybe not, just hear me out.) Rather than building yet another big, ugly site, how about creating a set of standards that would allow sharing between sites? I'd love to hang out on G+, but I know a bunch of technophobes who wouldn't want to switch.
Frankly, I hate the whole centralized shit - it'd be nice to have a P2P social media - get the whole snooping industry out of my social network all together.
Again it doesn't really matter what they do, it's what they have the capacity to do.
Personally, I don't fit the demographic that doesn't have a Facebook profile, I have one. I didn't mean that post as a statement of my personal beliefs on privacy. I just know a few people that are in that demographic and there is nothing you can do to market social networking to them. Google's product launch was flawed in that it targeted them, and that's why Google+ is failing. If anything, Google+ diminished Google's brand identity by making those people more conscious of the data they were already giving Google, whereas before they were just thinking of Google as a tool, and they began to complain loudly.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
But yes, if I post I'm competing with a lot of big names and lots of posts for attention. That is why few people get +1s or comments on their posts. You have to really develop a following of dedicated readers.
Makes me wonder whether a site that demanded you rate/categorize N comments before you are allowed to comment would go anywhere. Seems like a ridiculous idea, but Twitter managed to become a success not in spite of severely limiting the size of posts, but quite arguably *because* people know all posts will be short and require little committment. However, people do crave attention, so they might be willing to put up with reading/rating other randomly selected posts/comments if it meant they were guaranteed some feedback.
Someone had to do it.
One of the reasons I decided not to use my google+ stuff was because I was afraid if they found some inaccuracy about my google+ information they would terminate my gmail account. It is much to large to daily backup and I just down feel the need to worry about getting a new account and updating everyone with my new email information
It's where real content lies. Google+ is for smart people, Facebook and Twitter are what retards use.
I signed up early with my usual nick, connected with my friends, started posting some stuff. Couple months later Google told me they're suspending my account due to their names policy, either I give them my real name or I go away. I went away never to come back. I do not care to come back. Unlike facebook, google knows everything I do online, and could kill anonymity in an instant should they want to or should the government ask them to.
I hold grudges for a long time though. Have not stepped in a Vons store for years after a manager refused to honor a price tag. They forgot to put "with card" on the reduced price tag, I never use their tracking card and their hardheaded manager preferred to lose a customer instead of an argument.
I'm still undecided how much cheaper it is, the price being paid from privacy of course. I know facebook is quite expensive. I have yet to see the pricetag on google plus.
Because Facebook doesn't work well enough? How do I find a historical post someone made on Facebook without scrolling endlessly through their page until I find it? Not to mention searching public profiles/feeds/whatever for some topic of interest. Facebook's mobile apps suck. They suck hard. You'd think the largest social web company in the world would be able to hire some developers to put together mobile apps that blow you away. But they're barely serviceable. The Instant Upload feature of the G+ apps makes getting media to Google+ (videos and photos) light years easier than Facebook.
I think Google+'s major flaw is the comparison to Facebook in the first place. To me, it's more a direct functional replacement for Twitter, but with much better ways to handle interaction and conversation. (For that matter, how do you search Twitter for historical stuff?) And then it can accomplish what Facebook does, too.
Google+ is great! Oops, sorry. I don't have any actual evidence to make that claim.
Google shot themselves in the foot the moment they put that incompetent clown known as Vic Gundotra in charge. This idiot single-handedly ruined Google+ with his moronic Real Names policy, despite getting a lot of internal feedback about what a bad idea that was. The fact that Google tries to shove the G+ crap down every user's throat doesn't help. Google also reached a new level of creepy when they enabled the Search Plus Your World crap that one is interested in.
It's funny that you would mention William Shatner, as his account was suspended by the moronic system Google uses to detect fake accounts, shortly after launch. They of course restored it but never really apologized because Google never makes mistakes.
--
Sundar Pichai is the utter asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the shutdown of Google's Atlanta office. Great work!
Facebook users joined Facebook by choice. Myspace users joined Myspace. AOL users had to pay to join AOL in the early days.
Google+ users were drafted. Google's idea of marketing is "we're making you an offer you can't refuse".
The problem with this is that they are only counting public posts. If I post a hundred updates on Google+ and share them with my Friends circle, then none of those updates would be counted using this methodology. Even if I have a hundred friends and each of those friends reshares it to a hundred more friends. (Of course, short of Google releasing official numbers, it's hard to gauge how many people are actually using it.
That being said, I've all but abandoned my Google+ page for two reasons:
1) I blog and use social media under a pseudonym, not my real name. Google+ is requiring me to use my real name which makes me uncomfortable. First of all, I've worked hard to build name recognition under my pseudonym so people know me by that, not by my real name. Secondly, I don't want people being able to track down where I live based on my full real name. (I've had to deal with an online stalker so this is actually a concern.) Yes, I realize I'm posting using my real name here. Honestly, if I could change my username here without ditching this account and signing up for a new one, I would. (I used my real name for Slashdot years back when I wasn't as concerned about using my full, real name online.) Besides, I'm not saying what my blog/social media pseudonym is so the two can't be tied together.
2) There are no third party clients to post to Google+ or check the streams. If I want to tweet, I can use Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Seesmic or a dozen other clients. I can find the one that works the best for me. Some of these clients would also let me post to Facebook (if I had a FB account, which I don't). However, Google has yet to release a read-write API. They only have a read-only one. So if I want to post something to Twitter and Google+, I need to post it to Twitter and then go to Google+ to post it again.
Combine these two with limited social media time and my Google+ usage declines more and more.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Google+ is, wait, wut? My phone just changed Google Market to Google Play so, ...
Wait, wut?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I reluctantly cancelled my Google+ account because it actually removed functionality from Picasa, which I use almost every day. If you have a G+ account, you can no longer upload images from the program to your Picasa web albums; you are forced to upload to G+'s dumbed-down image gallery instead. You are given no choice whatsoever; if you have G+ the only way to get content onto web albums is if you happen to know the URL of your albums (a link is rather pointedly NOT provided), go there in a browser and upload the images using the web album interface. The only way to go back to uploading from the program is to cancel your G+ account. I didn't want to, but Picasa is more important to me than Google+. I generally love Google, but this was a dick move.
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
I thought i was the only one who thinks G+ is a lonely place , what i believe G+ is too complicated to Use :(
Every single able bodied person you know has the capacity to commit murder. That's not a good enough reason to never tell anybody where you live, or what your work involves, or any other thing which might facilitate them killing you. Instead, you wait until you know them before giving them anything which they might use against you.
Google has been around a while, and has demonstrated what I would like to call 'integrity of character'. Sure, they collect information on you, but they've worked out a way that they can make money from that without spamming you with ghastly ads or selling your information to people who will use it against you. Personally, I have no problem with the way they've conducted themselves so far, and as such I'm willing to trust them with my personal information.
Facebook, on the other hand, has been terrible. They've continuously asked for the most private of data, their privacy policy keeps changing, anything you upload belongs to them, and their default privacy settings are exceptionally lax. Despite this, and a slew of annoying ads, they still aren't making much money (through revenue, not investment), so they're going to have to start turning the screws one of these days.
I also have a Facebook profile, but I'm careful what I put up. My profile tends to be funny posts from 9gag, interesting articles I've found online and witticisms, all of which I don't believe will ever be able to be used against me or advertised with effectively.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Please note that the article talks about _Public_ posts.
I post several times a day in G+, and so do a lot of people in my circles.
However, I hardly ever make public posts.
No sig for the moment.
It's funny... all my friends claim to like Google+ much better than Facebook. I guess everyone has to jump in at the same time or no one will budge. I thought the horror that Timeline is would be enough to do the trick but no such luck.
The G created a harsh climate at the rollout by deep-sixing early adopters (some well-known web personalities, trend-setters, creatives) without explanation or recourse just because they didn't like their log-in names (??!! You'd think they weren't around back when The Well was a hot item ... or ever found time in their busy schedule to watch a TED talk that wasn't techie.)
Google is genetically incapable of 'getting' social networking. They threw away their golden halo years ago.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I love G+ and hate FB, but it's not surprising G+ is having trouble gaining traction. For example, it's missing some pretty critical features, such as "events" and the ability to exclude individuals when posting something (there are times when I want to post something visible to all my friends except 1 or 2, just for the sake of this comment and not enough to give them their own circle, thereby breaking their permissions on everything else I posted). Considering Google already has a slick calendar, their lack of any sort of event feature is mindblowing. Arranging events is one of the main reasons I used FB in the first place.
As I understand it the study only looks at public posts. So what they are measuring is not social activity, but its use as a microblogging site (Twitter vs Facebook competition).
I'm one of the many folks on G+ who love the ability to keep posts private and on topic. In fact most of my activity isn't even going to show in th public results unlike Facebook (where you have to ensure everything is private before posting). Simply put, those of us who actually use G+ find that it's easier to keep things on topic for posts then the constant keyboard diarrea that Facebook is. The main feature we love is the privacy settings, think of it as being in a meeting room - yes it can get damn noisy and such but it's contained within a single room instead of standing in the middle of the Colliseum with Mics being shoved down your throat and every damn reporter asking "Do you still beat your wife" type questions.
Personally, I'm not that active but some of my circles have activity levels that rival any discussion on /. that I've seen since signing up but I don't have to worry about down modding trolls and idiots as I can simply mute their replies and the entire sub-thread. Much nicer then some of the crap /. gets at times.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I've always hated being inundated by inane posts, having difficulty finding the signal among all the noise. Plus, everybody who found out your name suddenly wanted to be your facebook friend. I didn't have a public searchable profile, but people I met would ask, "do you have a facebook account?" and I couldn't just flat out lie because somebody else who was in my list of friends would nearby and chime in, "yes, sure he does." Then I'd be put in the situation where I either add the person to my list of faux friends to add further noise the updates I see or tell them, "I don't want to add you" which is seen as offensive.
You add them, then the first time you consider them "noise", you click the down arrow next to the post, and select "Hide all by..." No more noise.
It doesn't help you if you want them not to see what you're posting. But it does eliminate the noise problem you complained about.
For limiting your publishing on FB you can create your own groups and post to them, which is the equivalent of Google+'s circles. The UI isn't nearly as good as Google's, but the effect is the same.
Your friends are a sad bunch if they think you not replying to them in Facebook means that you don't like them anymore.
...or they're women.
Having been recently bit by the Facebook privacy issue (or lack of, more appropriately), I had a lot more incentive to try an alternative that would respect my privacy. I recently lost a friend, whom I have known since high school for 27 years, over some comments I made on a thread on Facebook to an entity that I am "friends" with there which he neither knew or cared to know, concerning a rather current political "hot topic". My comments were made and directed to a selected group of people that I would have never shared publicly in person, especially with this friend who vastly differs from opinion with mine and who's feelings I respected (on a side note, IMO, this is a rather trivial matter to throw away what used to be at one time a close friendship and of that duration, but whatever).
Point is, Facebook seems to feel that ANYTHING I post should be of interest to ANYONE who is on my friends list, whether those people know each other or not. A sentiment I don't share. I couldn't care less what comment one of my friends makes on a picture someone posted whom I don't know or never will know or on a thread they commented on to some random person, etc. Isn't that type of behavior considered eavesdropping, spying, or dare I say borderline stalking in the real world? Why does Facebook think it fine to do by default with anyone who is part of their community, I wonder (unless explicitly given permission to do so by said individual)?
Anyway, let's just say that G+ seems very appealing to me right now. Problem is, no one I care about socializing with online is there or posts at all. In fact, this /. article inspired me to check on my G+ profile and what I found was a post from a friend from July of last year. Not very a compelling reason to want me to convert. Facebook, on the other hand, has many posts from family and friends that I personally know who may live far away geographically, and is a convenient way to keep in contact rather than try and play phone tag or email tag, etc. (they post when they have the time and I can read it and respond when I have time and it is more "interactive" as a whole over other mediums).
So for now, Facebook is the winner to me even with the annoying layout and mixture of irrelevant drivel (the new "Trending Articles" placed on the home page Newsfeed just sucks and doesn't add to my enrichment there at all). I am just very much more cognizant to the fact that anything I post there must be something I wouldn't mind the entire world knowing. I will stick with it and take the good with the bad. If I want to say something to a friend privately, I will just send an old fashioned email or perhaps a private message on Facebook, for the time being.
I forgot about that one but I have always wanted that too. Anything set related needs to be part of their permission scheme. For example, set intersection if I only want to share with people who are in both circles but not those only in one. While this might be a little complicated for some, they don't have to use the feature and as some other have said, most of the people who regularly use Google+ are technical people. They already understand how to use sets. Outside of the whole set thing, I should be able to change permissions on the fly.
Anyone can "friend" you. I find that irritating. I would rather everyone be completely blocked unless they ask to be friends, and I have to know and approve them to do that.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
> According to RJMetrics, 30 percent of first-time Google+ public posters don't
> post again. Of those who make five public posts, only 15 percent post again.
Oh, no, whatever shall I do if people who don't have anything to say don't say it?
> The average time lapse between posts is 12 days,
How will I know what they had for breakfast?
What happened during their daily commute?
Did they score points in Bejewled Blitz?
What will I do without this vital information?
> The average post receives fewer than one reply, fewer than one '+1'
> (the equivalent to Facebook's 'Like'), and fewer than one re-share
Do people at least requote the whole thing and say "Me too"?
No? Really?
Huh. And here I'd been ignoring Google+ on the theory that it was
probably just like Facebook. Looks like maybe I should have a
look at it after all. It could have a signal-to-noise ratio almost
as good as usenet, or slashdot comments. If so, that would be
a huge improvement over other social networking sites.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Duh! It's been censored. ;)
I have a similar experience and found that it's basically a strange reader.google.com for me, so I just stick with reader and ignore g+.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
These numbers are displaying *public* posts. I post quite frequently on my G+ account. Just not to the public because what I have to say is none of the public's business unless I want it to be (or am posting on /.)
The thing is I think that Google+ users are not treating like a Facebook clone. We're using it differently. We have little need or desire to click +1 on everything or post everything that happens in our lives. If we wanted to be mindless like Facebook we'd be on Facebook. It's not that we're lonelier than Facebook users but instead that we're not as chatty. This comparison is like saying that college students who don't go to frat keggers are lonelier.
Problem is, except for possibly the "hangouts" which I don't know what they are (chatroom maybe?) it's all the same stuff everyone already has on facebook or even myspace or pick your social networking site. The price is the same (your personal information), so where's the benefit to using google+ over some other service? Celebrities have lots of followers on facebook and spam the thing up there (ok, their PR departments actually do it for them). If you've liked a bunch of celebrities on any social network then the constant status spam is likely to drown out your actual friends' posts no regardless of the site. I'm not saying g+ is bad, just that it's the same thing that's already been done. I fit nicely into that statistic in TFA where I registered, posted twice, and never went back.
The largest, smartest, and fastest search engine... Access to most of our cell phones (contact lists, voicemails, text messages, etc)... New Docs/Drive website that makes it easy to create office documents... Google Voice... Pictures of my house that people can virtually drive past... What doesn't Google know? Can't imagine why people would be hesitant to start filling the Google coffers with the intimate details of their social network...
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
What is actually on Facebook after all? Is there any reason for me to open an account just to pretend that strangers are my friends?
Facebook, where every Tom, Dick and Mary tell their life stories daily. Google+, where if you want to contact a like minded individual, you do, without all the bandwidth hungry apps, targeted ads for your sex, age group, possible ED, and annoying popups. Hmm... sounds like there are some not driven by the maddening crowd.
Exactly.
Though also not exactly being filled to the brim with "good", to the way that actually "doing no evil" seems likely, is also a factor for me. Who do they think they're fucking kidding? The scariest option is that they're actually kidding themselves.
The organizations that are worthy of trust, and they *do* exist, since they're all made of people, never have the dysfunctional greed that would allow them to become as huge as other corporations. IMHO which I just pulled out of my ass, Google are too much technocrats to solve what ultimately is a social problem, not a technical one. Though it may still beat the outright sociopathy of Zuckerberg or Microsoft, it's not enough.
I use both G+ and FB.
The great joy of G+ for me is how easy it is to share some content with some cirles.
So I share pictures of my kids with my family and links to Scala programming with my geek friends.
Only sometimes, I'd like to share some of my "personal" stuff with the FB crowd as well.
I have tried several chrome plugins and FB's mobile e-mail sharing, but none of them really works.
Do you guys know of a way to share a private G+ post to FB??
Same here. I have nine messages in my stream that were posted today. All of them are from people I actually know, most of them close friends: these are real messages, not random spam. Of those nine messages, four have already been commented on by other people. Sure, there are lots of people who tried out G+ but never really got into it. But so what? There are lots of people who do use it actively.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
That's a feature of who you friend, not of the site.
A lot of these comments seem to indicate that those on Facebook are all posting publicly, while Google+ is all about privacy/circles. Is this actually the case? I haven't made a public post on Facebook since well before Google+ even came around. I also seem to come across maybe a 60-40 split of people I'm not friends with who have their entire profile/pictures publicly available to those who have it restricted to friends only. Probably still a majority that are public, but majority doesn't mean that Facebook = everything is public.
Granted, most of my posts on Facebook are to all of my "friends," so it is like one giant circle getting spammed by me, but that's still not "public." And from time to time I limit my Facebook posts to specific lists I have (a little clunkier to manage than Google+, but essentially the same effect as circles). So I personally see very little difference between Google+ and Facebook in terms of privacy of my content and how I share my content.
This story is full of fail...... the very reason people use G+ is so that they can post NON-PUBLIC content to their specific circles!
If they want to really get useful information, then need to ask Google for the aggregate statistics of posting activity including private circles.
I'm just petrified that my friends and family will find out all the nasty and weird shit that I google for somehow. This is so much more possible to happen in future with google+
I'm not sure it was quite as simple as that. Google had one huge thing going for them at the time, which was that g+ wasn't facebook. They hyped the network and its privacy advantages very well, made the initial intake through invites desirable and exclusive, and close to the official launch there was an enormous amount of interest, both here on /. and in the MSM.
Where Google made a massively huge mistake was in closing people's Google accounts because of a misguided belief in real names, just before launching g+ to everyone. Almost overnight, g+ went from desirable to detestable in public opinion. I suspect that if Google hadn't been so stupid, they may well have succeeded in taking over from facebook -- don't forget that they'd successfully taken over altavista's search market back in the day. In the history of PR cockups, Nymwars was pretty big.
I used to only use FB on the mobile app, but it crashed so much and took too long to load so I ditched it. Mobile G+ is a lot faster and hasnt' crashed on me yet.
I used to use FB quite a bit, but then I took an arrow in the knee.
I wonder how many Google engineers commented on this thread.
There's your problem. If your G+ stream seems like a ghost town it's because you only have your Facebook friends in your circles.
In G+ you add people with specific INTERESTS to your circles. That way when you read your stream, you get posts from people with the same INTEREST.
The links below are to shared circles. Add these circles to your profile, your stream will jump into life.
General Geek Circle
More General Geek Circle
Interesting Folks Circle
Video Game Industry Circle
List of Circles
Once you get it, you'll find that G+ has a 5000 person circle limit...
Task Mangler
You can't switch social media sites every time one leap frogs the other in features. I'd imagine facebook will fix its shortcomings soon enough to keep Google+ a ghosttown. They'd have to be very negligent for years for that to change.
Her conclusion does not necessarily follow from the data. If all +1s, replies, and re-shares were under 0.5, then it would. But they aren't, so it doesn't.
Yeah. Social network filled with non-social people seems like a great concept!
Post here as AC and then hear the wind blowing.
One got to have a lot of nerve to talk about Google+ after seeing what /. has become...
There was a short window of time at the beginning when I was curious about Google Plus but it was closed or something.
I currently stay away from anything Google Plus like the plague.
I have been known to click a +1 button but I don't even know if that is the same as the Google Plus blog network or whatever it is where they pay celebs to be cool online somewhere I don't ever go.
For me, I would visit someone's blog or website but only not if on Google Plus. G+ Die fast!
You're fucken retarded if you can figure out how to search posts on fb. There's a big box that says "Search." Enter your term there, then there are filters on the left side... one of them is "Posts by Friends."
Also.. http://twitter.com/#!/Twittersearch
Stupid G+ fanboy or employee, for sure.....
I created a FB profile years ago to keep tabs on friends, but no one uses it to organise meetups. Really it is only useful for seeing what a couple of people do. The rest of mundane fluff I can live without. So, I cancelled my FB profile.
I have received several invites to G+, and I receive emails from G+ about people's posts (I don't know how this works.. my inbox receives notifications from some people's G+ accounts.. I haven't done anything to enable this.. ) but I can't sign up for G+. First of all, my account is not a 'real' name. I don't want to lose am gmail account just because the G+ network doesn't like my name. Secondly, I don't know what will happen if I do sign up and I can't find this out.
When I signed up with facebook I suddenly had 20 'friends' who had previously searched on FB using my email address shoved down my throat. Err. I don't care for a similar repeat on G+.
I really don't want information shared between google services.
I really don't want to lose my gmail.
So, now I have neither FB nor G+. If you want to talk, email me or call me. If you don't know my email address or phone number and can't find out from a friend of mine.. then you probably are not a friend.
After losing trust in adsense, it feels like Google should be a smaller part of my online life. I stopped using Google+ and am slowly weaning myself back onto decafinated evil.
No, it is a good "product", and has features that top both facebook and twitter, ...
no. facebook has more features that people actually want to use. hangouts is just a stupid gimmick.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
so people who don't want to be very social like g+ a lot. what does that say about g+?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
I think that the invite-only rollout was probably a misstep, as was not allowing business accounts for the first several months. Lack of event integration is also a problem.
Agree with those, but also it's too risky to post on Google Plus if you use other Google services. I did it for a little while, but here's my last post, from Aug. 3rd:
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I see more in my Google+ stream daily than I do in Facebook in a week. Why? Because I am following the people and things I am interested in on Google+. If you don't follow anyone who posts and don't post yourself, of course you won't see any activity. People's failure to understand how to utilize G+ seems to now be it's biggest flaw, but it's very hard to educate the stupid so it's going to be a hard one to overcome.
It's not that they don't want to be social, they don't want to be stupidly social. Socialize with friends instead of wandering the streets looking for a party.
There's more status updates on kim kardashian on fb and twitter. Why would majority move to use g+ when it has long and boring texts there. Who reads more than 160 characters these days for anything?!
I rarely do hangouts but they are not a gimmick. They are rather useful. Instant face time. Yes, you can do that in other ways but it's nice to have it implemented in my always on interface. And I don't have to go through the config issues, etc.
most other posters have been saying that g+ is not meant to connect friends, its meant to connect people with common interest, like photography, which seems to contradict your point.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
sort of like skype?? only not that good, right?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Meh, it works well enough for me. Which is what matters. Along with the mobile app.
Someone already said in a reply, but it'll take years of gross neglect for 900 million people to switch. G+'s major flaw is it was beat to the punch. It happens.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
"That said, I have a Facebook account to keep up with friends and family since (for the most part) that's what they use, and I can either do so or be a hermit."
I'd rather be a fucking hermit.
I don't have FC or G+ and I'm not a hermit. The people I care about contact me by phone or email. It works just fine. Even those that use social media know and understand I don't use it and they use the phone or email to contact me.
You can't data mine my life.