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.
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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!
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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Heck no, the whole benefit of G+ is the privacy, not spamming people you care about with things they don't, control.
it's great there isn't a ton of useless public content there, there is no noise, all signal. I post multiple times daily, but nobody knows that since only the relevant people can see the message.
It's replaced email, texting, twitter, phoning, become an actul useful communication medium with nothing to complain about.
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.
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.
No shit. I was okay with using G+ and really thought it had some great features and potential until Google started getting all fucking dark overlordish about using real names. That was when I drifted away from using it.
But as you mentioned, that bullshit about youtube commenting was insanely stupid. As was their decision to disallow commenting on Google Play without a vaild G+ account.
All that real name/closed environment bullshit was thought up by one very, very insecure person who had little experience (as compared to us older computer users) who did use GEnie, CompuServe, and Delphi for our first internet access and who also used dial-up BBSs back when a modem was an acoustic device you clamped onto a phone's handset.
Fucking google.... Still in mid-air during this shark jump.