50 Percent Will Abandon Facebook for Google+, Poll Finds | Hacker News Reader

50 Percent Will Abandon Facebook for Google+, Poll Finds

pcmag.com

39 pointsnextparadigms31 comments

This poll is inaccurate for many reasons:

- Poll audience is skewed (PCMag readership, people who showed up on the site that day)

- Just because people want to move to G+, doesn't mean they will, unless the rest of their social group does (again, back to point#1)

Not saying that Google + wont do well, or anything just that this poll is pretty much useless as reliable source to base any predictions on.

I would look at things like user engagement, activity etc - this is extremely anecdotal, but so far a lot of my circles (except for my close friends one) have been spammy with poor content filtering (facebook is good about surfacing posts from people i care about, but then again they have a lot more data about who i 'care' about)

My close friends circle has been pretty inactive and I check it maybe once a week, but that might be because there's only 30 people there. Most of my G+ activity over the last week has consisted largely of adding people into circles, and not much else, sadly.

I would also add that my social circles probably have a larger proportion of early adopters than the average user, since I studied programming & work in the software industry (and my social circles tend to reflect that).

I must admit I am also really nervous about merging my social & online identities into one account owned by one company, though the average person would not care about this.

You are right: Grannie is already on facebook and isn't gonna learn another social network interface.

The grannie in my family will sign up for whichever social network has the pictures of her grandson. So I think that even (especially?) non-technical users will choose whether to sign up based primarily on who else they know is using it.

In a related poll, 100% of flies trapped in spiderwebs want to break free.

I hope to god Google+ kills Facebook but I'd bet every single cent I have that 400 million Facebook users will not be leaving for G+ anytime soon.

Its a scary thought to have one company control almost all the data for a user. Just think what kind of data Google is collecting using their search engine, adsense, gmail, chrome etc. And now if they have users also move their social circles to Google+, it will give them almost complete information about a person. This is for them THE missing piece of the puzzle to tie everything together. Just for this single reason, I am never going to join Google+ however fancy and cool those circles look like.

I'be been wondering about this. Is better for one company to have all your info or multiple companies having all your info? At least by concentrating you can minimize the leaks no?

Which other company has all your info? Facebook doesn't have your searches, nor your emails.

They pretty much do albeit indirectly, they do have my (incomplete) web history from a bunch of site with like buttons and other such means. I'm not arguing Google has more then most but they all have enough to build a fairly complete profile of me.

50% said "yes" to Google+. 7% said Facebook is irreplaceable. The rest are undecided, unable to join Google+, or responded with "screw social networks".

On the other hand, it's a poll on PCMag. It's not a serious poll, so it's inherently worthless; and the readership is probably biased.

I feel I'd switch my use to Google+ if about 30% of my friends were there, if I liked the interface and privacy stuff more (I haven't seen it yet).

Plus, there's more than a snowball's hope in hell that Google+ will turn out to be a better development platform.

I agree that it's heavily biased. For instance, 12% said they haven't even tried G+ yet. Clearly that percentage is higher in the "real world".

And how many of those 50% have actually tried Google+?

At date I believe Google+ has around 30 million users and Facebook has 800 million+

How is this study possibly even close to relevant? I joined Google+ about 2 weeks ago and haven't even gotten used to their interface!

I am so damn tired of nonsense surveys without any form of significant or scientific basis.

Also; I believe that 70% of all Google+ users and Facebook users are likely to join iFriends.com (surveyed from Apple users)

     And how many of those 50% have actually tried Google+?

Not that I agree with these results, as I doubt that the sample chosen was significant.

But you should really do some reading on how statistics work.

I didn't mean to refute the actual statistics. I merely wanted to point out that the entire 'survey' carries the same value as 'News of the World' journalism.

Asking a user base whether or not they would be willing to trade object A with Object B without any experience of the alternative is useless.

If CNN asked 1,000 people if they would vote for Barack Obama or 'A better President' it would likely show that he would loose the next election.

>How is this study possibly even close to relevant?

i don't think it is. It just reflects sentiment and pent-up dissatisfaction with the arrogance of the monopolist. I.e. world needs a viable alternative and _hopes/believes_ that Goggle finally has delivered. If i were on Facebook and have a chance to switch to G+ - i'd. ( i'm not on Facebook or G+ or any other social network, except LinkedIn which is just more convenient contacts database than looking everywhere for email addresses for references )

The poll actually determined that the ~50% of those sampled who would make the switch are kids who have their parents added on Facebook.

> Also; I believe that 70% of all Google+ users and Facebook users are likely to join iFriends.com (surveyed from Apple users)

For a moment I thought "What? When did I miss Apple coming out with their own social network?" and so I checked iFriends.com; all I have to say is I wasn't really surprised at what I saw.

Well that will surely teach me to check the ramdom URL's I type. Was merely making a lighthearted comment on the irony of choosing a user type and asking them aimed questions.

Disclaimer; Not an ifriends.com user and never will be. Seems like a cheap adultfriendfinder affiliate. And a crappy one at that.

Jesus Christ, at least warn us about the NSFW! I barely had time to close it after seeing the title.

It's incredibly difficult to poll populations of 750 million people and get an accurate cross-section. Especially when that population is spread out across multiple continents. To give a sense of scope, the number of people polled represents only 0.0008316% of Facebook users. With a sample that small, you'd have to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure diversity in polling cross-section.

In other words, this poll is useless.

... TBH if only 50% of users in the current primary demographic (PC Mag) are interested... that might not be a good result for Google+ at all...

There's also some users from Twitter, and also other users that have never liked Facebook and aren't using it. So Facebook may end up keeping 700 mil users, while Google+ could have 600 mil, or more.

I'm not as optomistic as yourself. Outside of my IT friends Google+ is currently a joke. Even inside my group theres a strong division, theres a strong feeling that Google is going to far, alot of people are already upset with Googles privacy issues adn this is a whole new level of issues.

The next thing is 20mil may seem like a great figure, but thats only ~7% of gmail users. That figure is actually pretty average in terms of its user base and a hot new product a month in. I would be slightly concerned if I was the product manager... especially with reports of decline already...

And don't pretend the invite thing why its low, I don't know a person who hasn't got an invite including both my elderly parents.

I don't think Google will fail because of the army of fan boys and wannabes, but I don't think in its current iteration it offers anything that can grow a community.

Holy sampling bias, Batman!

This sort of non-story is the kind of thing that makes me want to revoke a "journalist"'s posting privileges.

50% ? Awesome. But in my city, 99% of people doesn't even know what is g+. That 1% are geeks and my family members I told about g+.

That only sets Facebook back like, what, a year?

If the poll is somehow perfectly accurate then 50% of ~800 Million is still a pretty decent userbase.

But if Google give Facebook a chance to fearmonger about how Google+ users risk losing all Google services (including gmail history) without warning while simultaneously not allowing anyone with a Google Apps account to access the service without really cumbersome workarounds then Google+ will be remembered just like Google Wave is.

Don't forget that's 50% of around 6000 techies. In reality I would've thought at least 90% of those 800 million users are non-techies. Maybe they are doing lots of advertising in the states, however here in the UK I'm pretty sure I could ask most non-techies and they wouldn't have even heard of Google+.

It's the one thing that's going to make it tough to beat facebook now is that it's become a household name - most people have heard of it even if they haven't been on the site.

And that's mainly because of their so-called development platform picked up by marketing researchers. I am still astonished to see grown-up companies with functional websites driving traffic to "their" out-of-control Facebook pages even with full page ads.

If Google+ would appeal for marketing purposes, I bet it'll gain at least as much popularity in a blink of an eye.

how can someone loose all google services?

I guess in their defense, they never said it was a scientific poll.

Poll taken from Google+ fans

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