Poll on Google+ : 98% like it; 81% Prefer it to Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Poll on Google+ : 98% like it; 81% Prefer it to Facebook

twtpoll.com

93 pointspitchups49 comments

Also 53% Prefer it to Twitter; 77% think it will be a success. Based on 220 votes of early Google+ users.

Because a random subset of fanboyish social networking addicts in the follower list of the kind of person who finds this stuff interesting enough to create a poll, is a representative sample of the average user.

Add to that the fact that g+ is barely a week old. Facebook has been around for quite some time. Of course people are excited about Plus.

For some reason I'm now wondering about nomenclature. "Google+" seems kind of unwieldy. Should you call it Google+, Plus, or G+?

I've personally been sticking with verbalising "Plus" and writing "G+".

You and I know that, but the purpose of the poll isn't to be accurate--it's to advertise Google+ on social news sites like HN.

This poll is statistically useless. There are 2 layers of self selection involved. The user has to choose to use Google+, and then, after having chosen Google+, the user has to choose to take this poll. So, given that, its not surprising that lots of people like Google+ on this poll.

I would prepend another layer to your list: the user has to have been chosen by Google to participate. This is still a closed beta, and it's highly likely that the simple act of being among one of the Google+ Chosen Ones means that survey respondents have a positive bias.

Disagree with the second part of the reasoning. On the forums people show motivation to report dislikes and negative reviews. So for sure you would hear about the negative user experience, especially after people invested time in the gizmo.

Regardless, it's impossible to weigh your sense of the motivation of respondents to be negative against the extent to which they've self-selected, at least in any scientific way.

who claimed a "scientific way" with this poll? for real!

Which is exactly what the OP is trying to say, that this poll is statistically useless and therefore has no value.

Probably interesting to the person making the poll, to see how many of her followers liked Google+. Completely useless to anyone else.

Is it possible to like Google+ page on Facebook? That would be quite an indicator to get people to move en masse to Google+.

Trouble is Google+ is invite only. So over time, Google+ will lose some momentum and I'm expecting articles of 'G+ invite fatigue' any day now.

It's not just invite-only, but in fact if you have received an invite you still can't get in at the moment. It's pretty irritating to receive an email saying your invited showing a bunch of cool stuff and then have no way to see it (and 403 if you're logged into the wrong Google account).

Particularly since it is just a blatant attempt to mimic FB's original exclusivity (i.e. only a small list of colleges). Like, it's not a thing. It's not full. Google is giving everyone 7 gigs of space for email now. They're not short on storage capacity!

Sorry Google, I don't have time for stupid marketing games, and I expect this to go the way of Orkut.

Based on my G+ usage it's not a gimmick at all. They seem to still have scaling issues (and bugs). Friends changing their profile pic can take hours before it stops bouncing back and forth between the new one and old one.

The point is, they are still bug hunting and fixing (still can't edit your birthday for example) and it doesn't make sense to let the whole world in until they have solved the most obvious ones.

Have you considered the possibility that it's not a marketing game?

Like I say, G+ isn't an actual thing, like a box or a bucket. It can't "fill up" while there is evidence of massive spare capacity in the Google infrastructure. Pure gimmick.

Don't be ridiculous, it's not a "gimmick". They're not referring to HARDWARE. They're referring to engineers, debugging, and load testing.

Their supply of engineers isn't infinite, so, tell me, is it a gimmick to slowly roll out the service while you fix bugs and chokepoints that you wouldn't have discovered in internal testing? Is it a gimmick to do this at a rate that makes it possible for the engineers to actually fix the bugs as they discovered, rather than have a few thousand an hour bring the entire system to a screeching halt?

You must not write software, mr know it all...

Sure, use the bookmarklet: https://www.facebook.com/share_options.php

The big thing Google+ seems to be missing compared to Facebook is the ability to be a voyeur on other people's lives. I haven't used Facebook in years but I recall that was the thing that basically everyone spent their time doing.

Google+ seems to be much more focused on privacy and access control, which is exactly the thing that's going to prevent gossipy young people caring about it.

>The big thing Google+ seems to be missing compared to Facebook is the ability to be a voyeur on other people's lives.

As non facebook user that sees what other people around him do on facebook, I concur.

Maybe there is a niche for mature people whose social life consists of more than voyuerism?

Facebook's stalking feature has become a lot less interesting, now that they have turned it into Twitter.

this article would disagree:

http://www.quora.com/Yishan-Wong/How-Google+-Shows-That-Goog...

That guy seems downright disrespectful to his G+ followers. If he doesn't want them to read what he writes then I guess he shouldn't post publicly.

Absolutely. He wants and expects 'Facebook' and is going to complain every time G+ does something different. Why all the negative anger and hissy fits. Just use Facebook.

Invite only and centralised on techy beta users. The proof is in the pudding when my Nan, my Mum and my 10 year old nephew try ane use it and find none of their friends on it.

Meta: sad to see Hacker News dominated by so many pointless G+ stories. One story a day would be about right.

There are plenty of people who work at Google that post here, I wouldn't be surprised to see them pushing it. Remember the story about how bonuses are tied to how well Google does social this year.

Right. I don't see so much G+ noise on Reddit though, perhaps because Hacker News is smaller.

They should give you an invite if you like the Google+ page on Facebook!

Everybody knows that 73.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot, but I'm not sure that people know 97% of the rest don't measure anything useful.

No no, it's a useful poll! Now we know that Google+ is not so terrible that even its most positive users despise it.

Is Google planning to monetize Plus? At the moment, unlike on Facebook, there are no ads on the site. This certainly increases user satisfaction too.

There probably isn't a need to monetize it directly. If they can use it to improve search (their definition of improve) and increase clickthroughs on search ads it will more than pay for itself.

I'm really surprised google did not try to launch this on colleges similar to fb's roots.

A lot of college kids have serious issues with fb's privacy features. Instead of google plus building bloatware like hangouts or huddle, a decent events and pictures feature along with a launch on a few campuses could have been very interesting.

As it stands right now, it risks becoming another twitter where the only people managing to get in are nerds or marketers looking for another venue to post the crap. For fb, these two audiences were probably at the bottom of the list. I remember commenting on venturebeat around 20006 as myspace hype was peaking about this little phenomenon called fb that VB folks should checkout once they are done going gaga over myspace.

> bloatware like hangouts

Woah there. Hangouts are absolutely magical.

Two of my friends just moved to another city two weeks ago. When Google launched +, we all immediately hopped on hangouts and it was awesome. 6 of my friends were hanging out together, we all got a tour of the new apartment, had a good time. Since then we've used it to collaborate on various projects.

And given that I run linux at home, this is the first video chat experience I've ever had that actually worked. Ever.

Hangouts are not bloat. They are a killer feature.

I do agree that right now it feels like a Twitter just based on the type of users on it. It certainly is far from replacing facebook in terms of connecting with my non-techie friends who also have non-techie friends.

I like it too, but the [lack of] critical mass of people I want to "share" with concerns me. Facebook, like it or not, has the mindshare.

I'll use it of course; maybe people will migrate like they did from MySpace. Then again, maybe I will too to the next thing.

I look at it as a chance to start over. I can keep my circles small and focused. And no Farmville!

People are still in the honeymoon phase, give it time.

Though I was thinking, if Google allows posts to also be auto posted to Facebook, but Facebook doesn't do the same same thing then people will trend towards using Google+ over the long term.

Biased, self-selecting poll. Meaningless.

Right now, I "prefer" Facebook because none of the invites people have sent me have even appeared in my Gmail inbox yet.

I wouldn't mind so much if the invites were there in my inbox and I clicked on them and the system just didn't let me in yet. But going silent is annoying, because:

  ME: "Dude, send me a Plus invite!"
  FRIEND: "I already did, idiot!"  
  ME: "I haven't received a thing!"

You really need to let these new Google services exist for a while before making any determination on how good it is. The people who got into Buzz and Wave early were initially quite enthusiastic, but, over time, no one really stuck with either service.

Seriously? A post about some google fan boys making a poll to other google boys and getting a high percentage? Flagged. Keep your circle jerks off HN.

And yet in a given day I have 50x the activity on Facebook as on Google+.

It's new.

99% work for Google.

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