20 Million Google+ Users May Exist by the Weekend | Hacker News Reader

20 Million Google+ Users May Exist by the Weekend

pcworld.com

50 pointsjoejohnson43 comments

I've already noticed that my Google+ feed is becoming dominated by posts along the lines of "Why am I still using this? FB is the same and all of my friends are there"

I expect them to have a fair bit of churn once the novelty wears off and all the invites stop hitting people's inbox

edit: I have a lot of non-techie friends not in the early-adopter crowd (who I invited) so I expect, for them, it feels pretty empty. For people who read HN, it's likely much more vibrant. Ultimately, it's the mainstream that matters and, until it hits critical mass, I believe the people we pull in from the mainstream won't see the point and will go back to FB where their news feed is always full.

We must have different social circles then. I've yet to see any messages along that line in my feed.

I would have to agree with that. The initial posts in my circles are about how they love G+.

Same for me. 95% positive.

My friends are loving google+ actually. Last night we maxed out a "hangout" and it was a pretty incredible experience

I'm somewhat mystified by how much circles are talked about in proportion to how cool they are vs. how little hangouts are talked about in proportion to how cool they are.

Circles are neat, but nothing really amazing or incredibly original IMO. Hangouts, on the other hand, are IMO the coolest feature of a social networking website in the past few years, which I think a lot of people would agree with if they tried them. Yes, Skype has group video chat too, but someone has to pay money for it and I doubt it's as simple to set up as Hangouts.

I guess it's because Circles are a much more visible feature, but I don't know.

Frequency of use.

I have to think about and use circles multiple times per day.

I've participated in exactly one hangout. Video chat is really cool, but not so practical when you're grabbing 2 minutes of downtime, or when you're trying to be quiet because kids are asleep.

I'm going the other way--why am I still using FB? It feels out-dated. At its current pace, G+ will have all the people I care about in a few weeks at which point I can delete Facebook and not ever skip a beat.

Same here. Even my mother is already at G+. I think I will be able to delete my FB account in 1-2 months.

Yeah, I bet it will take me a month or two to phase out FB.

I've started seeing that from non-geeks that are entering G+. I think my two largest circles are Developers and New Media (journalists).

We will have to see what happens when everyone else gets on.

Is there any historical evidence that a meteoric rise in traffic, of this magnitude, has translated into a long term success? I am not making any prediction on Google+'s future; I am just interested if there are examples that I am not able to recall.

Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare had to earn their traffic along the way. The evolutionary process of going from 100K users to 750M users must be an important component in their success.

If these statistics for Google+ are correct, they seem to be leap-frogging the entire process that happens when growing your user base from nothing to something. I cannot decide if this is a benefit or a detriment to the eventual success of the product. I would love to hear examples or counter-examples of this.

I feel like G+'s success is related to Facebook's past success. Ever since G+ came out, I've seen many posts on my FB feed for people giving out and wanting G+ invites. The me-too mentality inherent in FB (and other social networking sites) means that people will want to join whatever site their friends are on. That being said, it will be interesting to see if G+ can keep these people around or if it is going to just be a passing fad.

What about Orkut and Buzz? I'd say that G+ is, in essence, another iteration of products they already had.

Definitely. The can happen whenever a company with a large user base launches a new product. Google Maps, Apple iPhone, a new series on HBO, etc.

So now the same back of the envelope calculation by Paul Allen will keep on getting rehashed as a breaking news story by every single tech site out there.

Google require that new users give them a valid phone number, and they phone you up to check you're not cheating.

That's way more intrusive than anything Facebook has ever done. My wife just flat-out refused to countenance the idea - so G+ lasted about 1 hour in my household.

I find it absolutely unacceptable that so many companies, under the guise of protecting your important data, insist that you give them your important data.

Facebook does this as well if it believes you're creating multiple accounts.

Right now everyone is signing up just to check it out. Let's wait and see what the active user count is in a couple months.

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I signed up because I feel this has the potential to be much better than Facebook. I am much happier with the privacy controls, and I feel like I am confident in knowing who can see what about me. I didn't always have this feeling when I used Facebook.

So, not everyone is meerly "checking it out". I am at least one user who will gladly move over from Facebook as soon as more people adopt G+.

I imported my Facebook friends and have a few hundred people mutually in my circles because of it. If you do that your feed will look very similar to Facebook :) Now if it weren't for event planning / events I'd probably have removed my Facebook account already...

I also want my photos. Everytime I try to use facebook2picasa it says it's down still... :( Either way, a lot of my now-nerd friends are starting to sign up for G+, so I think it won't be long until I drop Facebook entirely.

It's almost 2% of the users Facebook has.

In two weeks.

Buzz also gained millions of users in a short period of time.

That is not the question to ask. The question is to ask about the amount of users that have been active in the last week or month. The user count doesn't really matter.

Any new technology has to start with 0 users and grow from there. You could have used the same argument - but just use Myspace and Facebook rather than Facebook and Google+. In other words, I don't think it matters.

And engagement? All I know is in early days of fb I remember vast majority of people in large lecture halls being glued to fb.

I don't see remotely that type o of engagement with g+.

Facebook was most peoples' introduction to social sites, that accounted for a lot of the simultaneous fascination. I don't see it as a strike against Google+ that it won't achieve the same encounter with novelty.

In the early days of FB, the users were all horny college kids. Of course they were glued to what was essentially an online cocktail party.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/101307099794854494980/posts/2iRZ...

...and I'm still not one of them! :(

I'm almost going out and sitting on the sidewalk with a sign: "will code for a Google+ invite".

Drop me a mail at saawsaalaa@shortmail.com, I'll invite you. I accept Paypal.

I believe you can just sign up now...

That's great :)

if you want an invite, msg me: j dot schrittwieser at gmail dot com

Am I mistaken, or can Google "turn on" G+ for any google account, and have that count as a G+ user? It doesn't seem like these numbers are very meaningful. We need monthly-actives to accurately compare to Facebook.

They don’t though. You currently explicitly have to sign up for it.

I’m not even sure whether you can currently just sign up, I think you still have to invited (and it’s not enough to just be invited to count as a user, the invited person needs to explicitly sign up).

Let's talk about DAU then I'll be impressed.

Buzz also had millions of users.

Buzz was much more forced upon people though than this is.

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