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 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 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+.
...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.
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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.
If the numbers are accurate I am shocked. No way can I believe Google+ usage is that high.
It only sucks to the inane people. There are several huge technical communities over that they have a massively lower noise to signal ratio. If you want to talk tech and not cat photos, G+ is where it's at.
The Sport Touring community on G+ destroys the one on FB.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Same here. I almost never post publicly on G+. Why? Circles are why. Circles allow me to share my posts with ONLY the people I want. G+ has a HUGE RPG/Gaming community, which I am quite active in. I have never seen anything like it anywhere else. But - almost none of it is public. This is why I don't put much into the "Google + is dead" stories. On G+, you don't need to post publicly, and very few people do.
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
Except the "inane people" on FB are 10x more populous and 20x more likely to click on ads. The market doesn't give a shit about "technical communities", it cares about eyeballs.