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.
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!
That's pretty much it. Google was being pretty hard core about their real name policy on Google+, to the degree that people who Google determined had violated it ended up having their entire Google collection of services canceled.
Since I *do* use lots of Google services, but don't really care about the social media part, I never signed up for Google+. I didn't want to take the chance of losing the services I did value.
By the time they finally saw sense and dropped the requirement, I didn't care enough to sign up.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
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.
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.