Slashdot Mirror
Tracking Down How Many (Or How Few) People Actively Use Google+
BarbaraHudson writes Business Insider is reporting that despite billions of sign-ups, almost nobody is publicly active on Google+. Analytics and visualization blogger Kevin Anderson studied data compiled by Edward Morbius, who says that just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post public content. "We've got a grand spanking total of 24 profiles out of 7,875 whose 2015 post activity isn't YouTube comments but Google+ posts. That a 0.3% rate of all profile pages, going back to our 2.2 billion profiles. No wonder Dave Besbris (Google+ boss) doesn't want to talk about numbers," Morbius writes. For those interested both his methodology and the scripts used can be found here.
Google should just buy Facebook and get it over with. They have the money.
If there was a googleplus.com to go to and had a homepage, then maybe. But it's integrated into things and I don't get it. I use google chat, is that google+? Who knows!
With family members, as an alternative to Facebook (which I don't have an account on). Same privacy invasion, but better UI, no image down-sampling (there is a limit though), and better privacy controls. Literally nobody I know has or uses it, except my parents who I force to use it because they don't understand basic things like downloading email attachments and saving it to a local file system.
Google Plus started life as a hazard.
The thing shoved in your face that might volunteer your private information on YouTube or elsewhere should you click the wrong button.
Or the unwanted question when using Gmail.
After negative momentum, no one listens.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I dip in and out, occasionally posting pictures and responding to stories, but typically I don't produce on it, just consume. Mind you, besides slashdot, I don't really produce anywhere, so that's not really saying much. The news and links are good. I'd rather they allowed their topics / posts / etc.. to be absorbed through RSS or the such, and I have definitely seen Google recently stepping back from standards (Gtalk for instance) and regardless of the why's of the matter, I'm not sold on Google 'winning the war', but it is a nice place to discover information that I would've otherwise missed from other sources, or apathy.
Bye!
Frankly Facebook is a huge mess. Plenty of people I interact with use it too. It may be a less popular social network but why does that make it a failure? I love the fact that it seemlessly integrates with their other stuff!
I find the "communities" better on Google+, but all my friends post there normal stuff on facebook. I find the technical forums (the few that I am a member of) are asking a newbie question (nothing really interesting) like how do I print a number..... when it is facebook, but much more interesting communitie tech posts on google+.
I post. Doesn't seem to suck to me. My family is there, my friends are there.
It could be better. Faster, mostly, and a little better at blocking other users, but all in all, I find it adequate to my needs.
Also, I wonder about the analysis. Perhaps all the active users are in the AI and other groups where I hang out; but somehow, I doubt it. Maybe I don't understand what he means by "post public content"; wouldn't that be a post to a group or a post to one's own profile? Because there's a great deal of that going on.
Anyway. As long as it's there, I plan to use it. Meets my needs.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I like google+, but these figures aren't all that surprising. The signups really are people activating their smart phones, using gmail, signing into youtube or any other google service. Without knowing it they have created their google+ account but in reality have no interest in the service.
...but almost all of the posts that hit it are private, posted by people who deliberately use G+ precisely because there's more plausible deniability about how active they are. It's anecdotal, but I've heard a lot of my G+ friends say that they've gone there either to avoid people they'd otherwise have to interact with on Facebook, or because circles are easy to use and they can pretend to be lurkers/have dead accounts there but they're really just not posting anything visible to you.
That said, I freely admit there are a ton of people not on G+. It seems to mostly be a hit with the 25-45 crowd, if my feeds there are any indication. Older people don't get it, and younger people seem to care more about Instagram than either Facebook or G+ at this point.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Analytics and visualization blogger Kevin Anderson studied data compiled by Edward Morbius, who says that just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post public content.
And of that "just 9%"... how much was activity on other Google properties where you have to jump through hoops NOT to have it cross-posted to Google+?
I know they mentioned YouTube comments, but this was also an issue with YouTube videos. If you posted one on your channel, you had to take steps for it not to be crossposted to your Google+ page. And, of course, most people who post on YouTube were semi-forced to create a Google+ page simply to remove some artificial constraints Google added with the goal of attempting to force Google+ adoption.
#DeleteChrome
It's like Facebook but without any users. Like those empty cities the Chinese like to build...
i pointed this out before, but google's policy of forcing people to give their *real* names is incredibly dangerous. google set themselves up as the *authority* - the guarantor - that the person you are contacting is exactly whom google *says* they are. now, given that it's possible under gmail to register very similar email addresses (with and without "." in them) we have the potential extremely litigous situation where someone could be deceived and then sue google - rightly - for damages based on google's guarantees - safety about identity - not being properly upheld.
contrast that situation where *everyone knows* that you don't trust email. or any kind of unconfirmed interaction on the internet.
and i think this is what people felt - subconsciously - both inside google as well as outside, that there was something very very badly wrong about forcing people to both disclose but also to allow google to "certify" their identity.
the other thing is just that... google+ is... simply... devoid of excitement and interest. it feels like it's a single-track uninspiring place, with one direction that Thou Shalt Go: google's waaaay.
contrast this to how facebook operates (or how myspace operated): i realise it's information-overload, but that's *precisely* what makes facebook (and made myspace) an interesting place to be. there are several ways to get to the same stuff.
strange as it may be for someone who is alarmed at the ease by which it is possible on facebook to track someone down merely from their first name (yes i met someone at a party, couldn't remember their surname, but managed to guess their approximate age, guessed that they must live in the approximate nearby area, then used the advanced search on facebook to find them... took a couple of weeks to work out i have to admit, and no i am *not* going to describe here on slashdot how it's done...) ... ... despite that, i have to say that there is actually something useful, and just generally more... homely about facebook than their is about *any* google products. google products are just... sterile and functional. you use gmail to send mail. you use google search to... well... search. but you use *facebook* to tell everyone you know that you wiped your arse today, and that's hilarious.
it also occurs to me: i wouldn't want to put personal stuff up on google: they might index it and let people search on it. and i think that's really the key, there. facebook is closed. you *have* to have a login. your personal stuff is *not* indexed publicly in search engines.
so, sorry google: you got it wrong on this one, and you can't be trusted, even if you said you'd get it right.
Or billions of people automatically added to Google+ by deceptive landing pages after they log into their favorite Google service?
If the numbers are accurate I am shocked. No way can I believe Google+ usage is that high.
I think I use Google+ because that's the default way of backing up your photos on Android.
I don't hate Google+, but it's just not that useful. Facebook, on the other hand, is useful, and they're not doing much to Google+ to make it more useful.
Who wants to spend lots of time building a Google Plus network and posting there regularly when Google has a habit of shutting down services with little warning?
At least you have some assurance that Facebook is not going to stop being Facebook, but Google could decide that Google Plus is not worth continuing and shut it down.
What is Google Plus?
Seems pretty lively to me. Even too lively, at times. I have about a thousand people circled, and am circled by a few thousand. I do post public, but I post more private posts. People in my circles have a similar ration - maybe a bit more public than private, but very similar ratio to mine.
My experience of G+ is that it's a buzzing, lively, chaotic place with the usual fun, or thoughtful, or sometimes dramatic posts. Interestingly enough, I don't have any member of my family posting on G+
At times my experience of G+ can be a bit frenzied, but it's mostly fun. DEFINITELY not boring.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Google has some of the best minds in the world but it's still vulnerable to making mistakes, mostly when the information to make the right choices just doesn't exist yet.
Top-down control of the masses just doesn't work when they have freedom of choice. Google didn't leap to the top of the search market on a giant advertising campaign, they lept to the top because they offered something immensely better than their competitors. They don't mind advertising revenue by using market power to force people into their adwords API, they offer a smoother, better written, more intuitive, and more efficient interface that results in less friction and more profit all around. These are important lessons that Google missed when it tried to make Google Plus happen. To get enough people onto a social network you have to offer a social network that's so damn good people want to go there. People have to want to pay the cost of migration. "This lets me comment on youtube" just doesn't cut it.
Maybe it's impossible with today's technology. Maybe there's just no social networking killer app possible. Or maybe they'll hit on the answer this year. Whatever the case Google Plus was dead from the start.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Google Plus is not Facebook. Facebook is an endless stream of drivel. On Google Plus you can seek out and follow writers and organizations that you are interested in - a tailored stream of the news you want. It can very easily be passive and for a lot of people I bet it is just that. So not posting is not a valid criterion. That is using Facebook's reason for existence as a measure of success. Google Plus is different to Facebook and I am very pleased that it is what it is. I do post from time to time when it is relevant to the discussion, which is usually technical in nature. There are almost no "OMG look at my lunch" posts and that is a very good thing. With a bit of effort you can make Google Plus your own Slashdot with control over the content.
The conclusions are bogus. The numbers they run only examine public posting, because the data on private posting is inaccessible to them, and then they draw conclusions based on that. Most Google+ activity is private and/or takes place within groups.
One of the people involved stated "just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post content", (emphasis added) and then from that the article concludes no one uses it.
They also picked the first 18 days of the year to analyze the data; this is prime vacation time for most people for 7-14 of those days.
His distribution assumptions are not evidence based, they are straight assumptions about uniform distributions, and they are all drawn from a single file of 45K profiles, which is the same thing as saying "If you want a straight line fit, only select a single data point".
It'd be much more useful if he had verified the distribution uniformity through an analysis of other sitemap files, and even better if he'd just spun up an EC2 instance and looked at *all* of them.
But I'm sure he got a lot of clicks out of this.
Edward Morbius is also the name of one of the lead characters in the 1956 science fiction movie "Forbidden Planet" played by Walter Pidgeon.
9% of 2.2 billion users means that there are over 220 million users posting content.
That is an interesting definition of "almost nobody".
Seriously, I know quite a few people who just made a FB account because they pretty much needed one, for one of those bad mobile game or because of things like giveaways.
Now I don't use it - but there's an outside chance somebody there may actually try to get in touch with me that way someday.
Nobody is posting public content. That's exactly right. That is by design.
This is why G+ is better than facebook. You can post content to specifically who you want to. This is a lot harder to do on Facebook.
I /never/ post public content on either network. Never. But I do post a lot to my circles on G+, and the granularity of control is why I prefer it.
The study is flawed, because the researcher does not understand what he is studying.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Those of us who use it like it exactly how it is, because it's actually (mostly) useful content/discussions
Watching 'journalism' slowly degrade into shitposting all these years has NOT been entertaining.
This analysis (by necessity) only included *public* posts to Google+, which makes the conclusion completely meaningless.
You can't just sweep that detail under the rug when comparing Google+ to something like Facebook. One of Google+'s biggest selling points is the ability to actually control exactly who can and cannot see everything you post, so the proportion of posts that are completely wide open to the public is going to be much, much lower than on Facebook.
There's plenty of activity there, this guy just can't see it because it's being shared privately among friends and not with the entire internet. And rightly so.
they have a no-opt-out "real location contact" address policy for developers which I find just as dangerous as their Google Plus real name policy.
3. In some jurisdictions, operating a business without a public mailing address is a crime.
Last time I checked, 9% of 2.2 billion people was a LOT of people. I enjoy G+ greatly because it's not every person you ever casually met posting about what they had for lunch, etc. I barely use FB because of the trash that my feed has become.
G+ posters tend to be photographically-oriented and post interesting content and the G+ algorithms make it likely you will see new things that interest you.
The advantage of Google+ is that it's easy to limit posts to the circles that you want to see the posts. I expect that very little of the content is public.
There are good things Google does, one is the ability to export your user data, including posts. If you use this, export in JSON format, not HTML. You can use tools such as jq to export specific records, including your source marked-up text. This allows you to re-post content elsewhere (though that can still be work).
Progress, Models, Institutions, Technology, Limits
I'm not a real Doctor.
Deal of the century.
My 70 year old mother and all of her friends use Facebook instead of the phone now.
You lose. Accept it. Write the cheque.
..don't panic
Perhaps the problem is that people who use G+ post things when they have something to of value say, not when they took a shit.
My circles are pretty active, no, I don't know what they had for lunch though.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I don't social media often, but when I do, I use emacs.
Just get on and do 1 search for photographers or look for tech. Then tell me no one uses G+.
LOL your so wrong about G+. There are tons of people using G+. Look at all the photographers that use it. Please stop being one of those who spread false or lies about G+.
... your ratio's upside down.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
How exactly is this bad?
I shut my f-book account down because of the damn noise.
I might re-open it in a few months and delete 2/3rd of my 'friends'.
This.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
The only reason I'm a member.
Twinstiq, game news
I was there then (actually, 1980s). I didn't.
Progress, Models, Institutions, Technology, Limits
I'm not a real Doctor.
Exactly this. Business insider has never liked G+ and never given it a fair hearing. You get it right here. It's the only social media platform I use. In fact, I found this post via G+ link.
I was on the Internet in the late 80s, back when there was Bitnet, when USENET was king, even before IRC took off... when you had to write the path your emails would take to get to their destination. You couldn't be more wrong about anonymity and Internet culture. Most of us non-scientists had come from BBSs, where nicknames and handles were de rigueur. Sure you'd sometimes see real names in email addresses much as you do today, because they were assigned en masse by universities... student and faculties first initial + lsat name or whatever... but of course you didn't have to include your real name if you didn't want to for most online services at the time. When IRC did gain ground around 1990, I don't remember ANYONE using their real names on it. I don't remember AOL having any effect on anonymity, just on the amount of idiotic commenting.
... to store photos. They have a handy "share via link" function for entire albums, so you can easily share entire albums with friends (albeit without fine grained control of permissions... basically anyone with the link re-share it at will). There's no storage limit for images up to 2048px (longest side), and there's an easy way to download individual images as well as entire zipped albums.
As a social network though? Hahaha, I only have a Facebook account for Messenger - wtf would I need another network for?
What's this service do again?
I am not the kind of person to stand up on a soap box at Hyde Park Corner. So why would I post to the public? I do it to promote my boat building web site, period. Everything else I have to say is reserved for "family" or "friends" or other special interest groups/comunities.
Hey doesn't that sound a lot like "social media"?
realkiwi
Linus Torvalds is active!
Google made mistake by forcing usage of Google+, nobody wants to be forced - and nobody wants to make all things public. It can be a lesson to others.
I use it. Granted I'm not a daily poster, I never was on Facebook (deleted that account). I have friends and followers that will give me a + on many things. The communities are quite active actually.
If you hop on + and then do nothing, it will do nothing. If you get on and follow a few folks (think following on twitter) you'll be amazed at how much is actually posted. Join a few communities of things you enjoy, and you're page will be filled faster than you can imagine.
Some communities have hangouts / web chats. There is so much information and so much going on. Lastly, being a tighter knit community (lack of idiots and trolls) the content is better, the comments and people are better. It's currently a perfectly designed place to be for those in the know.
It's almost like we don't WANT people to know how good it actually is.
Facebook is the Walmart of the social media world. Sure everything you want is there but the quality is shit.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
I don't have a Facebook account. I don't have a Twitter account. I don't have accounts on these services because they don't provide me any services I need or want. Maybe they're valuable to you and that's fine but for me they are not useful. Google+ is pretty much in the same boat for me. There is no clear value proposition for me but there is a very clear value to Google. Hence I do not foresee me using Google+ in any social media capacity. All it seems to do is provide Google a way to track what I do and profit from it even better than the already creepy amount they do now. No thanks...
I just went to my "Profile" and "counted" my private posts. If I printed them all in Google Chrome's "pdf printer" it would take 93 pages to get all of them. If I only printed "public" posts: It would be more like 2 pages....
What sucks about Google+ is that Google tries to artificially inflate the numbers by forcing it on YouTube and other services, and they seem to be actively punishing people for using both Google+ and any other Google service, but on its own, Google+ is great. It was great during its early days before Google started to mess it up. The people who use G+ use it a lot and post far more interesting stuff on it than you're likely to see on FB or Twitter.
Google should learn to be happy with having something good, rather than ruining it by forcing it on people and then punishing them for it. And they should work to improve it further, rather than adding crap. I mean, who ever asked for polls, of all things? We want better tools to manage our stream. That's Google+'s strength, but there's so much more that could be done here. Instead we get polls.
but I comment a lot
The place is full of vertical groups - photographers, loads of technical (even iPhans), Political discussions from the US far right to the rest of the planets left, news about anything and everything from everywhere and no doubt stuff that I am not interested in and so have ignored...
So this is yet another posting from someone who has not really checked out the system.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
With the rise of social media sites that allow for the vast collection of data one people it was only natural that a company like Google that does just that wanted in on that game. So for them to want to establish G+ as a service is no surprise to anyone.
They way they did it however was pretty terrible and they deserved to fail. First of all they had to address the fact that some people are not going to want to join such a service; period. They don't want Facebook, never wanted MySpace, delete those annoying emails from LinkedIn, etc. They might know that they are not being given a service as much as they are being used as a product. Regardless of the reason why there will be some people that will not want, and resent if you try to make them, join such a service.
And with Google's campaign that was trying to force people to join G+ you built up resentment. A lot among the people who did not want the "service" in the first place and others who could have gone either way. The gamble Google was making here was that people would get over that resentment after a time because of how awesome G+ was going to be!
But forcing people to join the service was not enough. They wanted to make sure that this "service" was really a good product for them with their real name policy. The idea of giving out your real name worked for Facebook, and other services, because the whole concept of these social "services" was relatively new. People did not realize that they in fact were the product. By the time G+ was trying their hard sell enough of the population that might have been interested in G+ decided to give it a pass.
And that is pretty much were I think it stands now. Their track record with G+ is bad with their hard sell tactics and aggressive desire to make it a product for themselves rather than more of a service, people know exactly what is up with data collection, and other options exist that don't have such issues. G+ is a failure and likely never will be much more than that.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I don't use the social media part of it, though I do use it to backup all my pics from my phone and via Picasa. Unlimited storage is great and easy to access online. Otherwise I'd still be using "picasawebalbums" before they moved it over to G+.
Google+, supposed to compete with Facebook, never really took off. So, under the pretext of clamping down on spam and trolling in the comment section, Google made all Youtubers who want to leave comments sign up for Google+ as well.
Hence a large boost in Google+ population, but hardly any active users. And that's why the people in charge are coy about uptake figures.
For me, I'm kinda the odd one out. You see, the reason why I had signed up for Youtube many years ago (before Google's acquisition) was because some videos require age verification and a login. So I used by Yahoo mail account to sign up for a Youtube account. I had also enjoyed commenting on Youtube. But I would rather forgo my ability to comment than to be coerced into doing something against my will, especially if that something involves me making up the numbers to fulfill some corporate wet dream.
So, I still have my Youtube account (I never uploaded a single video). I never used my real name (despite Youtube constantly nagging us to do so for a period of time), and I still haven't signed up for Google+. I just view Youtube videos, read some comments and not bother to make a reply.
Self-discipline is a wonderful thing.
One individual users mostly publish to circles only. You know just to the people you want to. And they have a different thing for groups and public people to publish from. Just another statistic that lies. Sorry... That was redundant.
I read Google+ posts daily, in fact after gmail, it's the 2nd most used app on my iPhone. Facebook these days is filled with copy-pasta alarmist news posts and anti-GMO bullshit from idiot friends that have no clue what the fuck they're talking about. Google+ on the other hand is filled with beautiful photos and insightful commentary from people with experience. When I post something myself it is often a photo I am really proud of such as a system build or amazing sunset. Quality over quantity, kind of like how Slashdot *used* to be.
I honestly don't give a shit if it's a good product. For those of us with gmail accounts, it was virtually forced upon us. Want me to try something new?...ask first. Don't pull the same crap as Apple and U2 did. It may have been their best music ever, but I won't listen to it just on principle. This is an idiotic and rude marketing technique that needs to cease.
Just another day in Paradise
I started a page for a new project in December, and the auto-verify 'feature' gave me the 'approved' message, telling me it'd be 1-2 weeks before it gets finalized, and here we are near the end of January, and it's still not happened. The previous page i set up (maybe 2yrs ago) whipped through this process..so sucks in some ways being 'new' there. I also get the feeling the hashtags aren't used much. And my own experience is people, businesses and non-profits push content, but few actually will read it. (I see this in my stream, very few +1's and commentary.) So yes, lot of entities might be talking, but not to each other. I've been trying to interact with my new project, and while getting good success elsewhere, my G+ page hasn't grown. Really starting to feel like it's a waste of time (especially as someone else pointed out, Google has a habit of dropping things they get bored with...and their lack of function and development give me this impression with G+.)
My take is that Google+ works well with targeted communities like these. It's less "social" interaction, and more shared interests.
I would prefer to have most of my friends and family on Google+, since I can be more specific with what I share (my sports related activities can be shared with folks that I do sports with, the tech stuff, I can share with my techie friends, etc.).
However... a good chunk of my extended family are already entrenched in Facebook, and they complain about Facebook, but they don't want to move to something else because all their other connections are all on Facebook.
I quickly grew tired of all the socialist posts being Hot and Recommended and said poster's habits of asking for sources of opposing comments and then immediately disabling comments. Google+ is certainly anti-social media!
I love all the non-users posting about not using. I go to G+ every day and find interesting posts every time I look there. Why? Because I only circle people that post stuff that I am interested in. Also, Ii allows me to collaborate with people I don't know with very little effort. The only trolls I ever see are on the 'Hot on Google' posts. Which I would turn off if google let me! It is the most interesting and useful 'routine' part of the internet.
So I'm told all the younger kids 16 and under don't even use Facebook any more. My daughter who is 18 uses it but none of the kids younger than her do. I think kids don't want to get busted by their parents and their schools of the things they do and they don't want permanent evidence of the things that young kids do. I guess the kids like to use snap chat now and the latest is the Apple Air Drop and what ever the android equivalent is. So Facebook is for us old people. As for Google Plus I have it because I have a Google account because I have several android phones and some of my comments here and there get posted there. I guess Google plus is what it is but I don't consider it something I take serious. As for Google purchasing Facebook? Big waste of money.
Paul E. Bahre
My Friends & I use it pretty much all the time, and I'm really the only one of them who occasionally posts anything public.
It's the antithesis of FB - and all the better for it.
It's pretty good! But many people do make use of the Circle functionality and therefore none of their posts are publicly visible. For them, this is one of G+'s main attractions.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Isn't that just because of obscurity? Early adapters tend to be more techy for various reasons. Take the web back in the early 90s. Or usenet before the September that never ended. There of plenty of maillist type groups that are much better for technical stuff. If they, say, bought facebook, wait for the hoards to come in and bring everything down to the lowest common demonstrator. Or the advertisers, that will work will google so they can sell to the unthinking people that share the easiest and most understandable ideas.
This "plus" thing - it's some sort of advertising annoyance that Google websites shove in your face from time to time? but I don't understand what this thing about "posting" on it is, and even less so why I'd want to do whatever that is. I'm not even sure how (or why) I'd go about finding out if someone were on Google+ to read my post. It's all terribly amorphous.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I personally think Google+ is great and I hope that it stick around much longer than Facebook or anything other social platform!
That's my opinion, now I'm sure most others will disagree...