New Data: Google+ Public Posts Decrease by 41% Over Past Two Months

And here we are today. Early this week, I decided that was it. They obviously aren't going to see sense, and I can't risk losing my account. So I've stopped posting. I don't even check it, except when someone replies to something I've already posted.

If it weren't for Real Name, I think it'd be a lot more popular.

Say what you like about Facebook, but if they ban your account, you don't lose your email, documents, calendar, etc etc etc. You can't say that about Google.

Have a look at their what's new page: http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&#... - mostly rather small tweaks, nothing yet that improves their circles concept (e.g. allow us to define which circles show up in our default feed).

Also, with regard to their new product 'huddles'; why haven't they integrated this with google talk? A lot of my friends use google talk, practically none of them use huddles. So instead of improving the groupchat on google talk (and maybe just release an iphone app already!) they roll out this new product that locks out desktop users. Anyone care to explain to me why they might have gone this route?

I would much prefer to use Google+, I prefer the interface, I like the Circles idea - everything sort of feels cleaner. But I can't convince any of my non-geek friends to join. They just don't see the point.

They probably found the social network analysis from the Gmail sign-ups (knowing who recommends to who) to be useful. However the difference between Gmail and Google+ is that Gmail is inter-operable with other networks via a standard protocol, with social networking that is not the case and they should have gone for as many sign-ups as possible.

All that said, they have a higher number of people per unit of time signing up than Facebook did when they started so it will take years for it all to shake out. Facebook also used exclusive/slow signups, but that was linked to university prestige/tribalism/rolling fad rather than just an apparently random process.

Ever since Google's decision to roll it out by providing invites exclusively to old white male technology bloggers, this has been an utterly male-dominated network. Is there even one soccer mom signed up to G+ in the United States?

Hint to developers: to make a social network, you need men and women to talk to each other.

(I also agree with the comments about the Real Name policy being very destructive to usage. Facebook, regardless of what their policies say, has a HUGE number of people using pseudonyms and very little enforcement against them. Nor do people have much to lose - okay, their friends list gets chopped down if their Facebook account gets dropped, but you can rebuild most of that in an hour. Google seriously threatens a huge chunk of people's lives if they cancel your account, and having Google executives proudly talking about how all this data will be really valuable to sell as an identity platform is Not Helping.)

When were the last time you saw, for example, someones wedding pictures? Or discussion about real life social events? Or anything social? That's right, never.

All you can see there is tech blog aggregation, couple of celebrities, some geek pictures and that's it. You can find more social interaction here on HackerNews or Reddit.

And then, you just stop sharing yourself and stop checking Google+ and go back to Facebook for social and other places for geek stuff.

The absence of momentum has suprised me. It seems users and developers were more excited about it. Now, big old FB is picking up momentum again.

They had their chance. It has passed. With lists and subscribe, I wonder what they will say is the real differentiation is from FB.

But if Google+ wants to succeed they need to get a LOT of mainstream people on board, and get them all at once. They need to make them hear the name Google+ in all mainstream channels: TV, radio, magazines, from celebrities - EVERYWHERE. They really need to do a big advertising push, or something to get the attention of mainstream people. And they need to get a lot at once, so it doesn't feel deserted for each one of them.

But the graphs mostly documents power users (g+-Twitter syncing), that might start to share some of there (less article-like) posts just with their circles, as the personal networks grow stronger and become more useful. That might be very good for G+.

After all, G+ cannot survive as a blogging platform.

Also why would public posts say much about a social network. I would imagine that Facebook's percental amount of public posts would go down in comparison to private posts. Does not mean anything.

How I divested from Google services. Others please reply with their own tales.

The first thing to realize is that, like most projects, you don't have to go from zero to 100% accomplishment in one step. Perfection never ships. My approach was to use the solutions that would get me off Google as quickly as possible, and then gradually search for better solutions. But you know what? None of these things are really that critical.

The second thing to realize is that Google services are really good, and in some cases you'll have to settle for something that's more than good enough, but not quite as good as Google. Risk vs reward, as always.

Gmail -> fastmail.fm and Thunderbird as my client (but they have webmail too). They've been around awhile and they have good credibility. I use their lowest paid plan, $5/year, so I've set up Thunderbird to download messages immediately, so as not to bust my storage limit. Their highest plan is $40/year and 10G storage; cheap and more than good enough. Their spam protection is OK, not as good as gmail's. In fact I had a minor episode of false positives, but it cleared up in a day.

Fastmail, if you're listening, I would pursue excellent spam protection (better than your current good enough performance) as an opportunity to win gmail (and probably yahoo) expats. The rest of your service is very, very good.

I have my own domain, and I just point my domain to fastmail now instead of gmail. Regardless of who provides your mail storage and transfer, I highly recommend having your own domain, it's cheap. Don't rent your identity from anyone. G+ may try to tell us that your real name is your most important piece of identity, but on the net your email address(es) is much more fundamental.

Reader -> Thunderbird. No, it's not in the cloud, but this was the fastest way to move. It's not my final step, and I'm slowly looking at other cloud solutions. I could conceivably stay with Tbird though. It's not a great solution, it was just the quickest to implement. It's rather clunky to add a feed, but reading is fine, and you can save posts just like email messages, in the same folders as your messages. That's kind of cool.

Firefox has something called Live Bookmarks IIRC, for feeds. I used it awhile back and I recall it worked pretty good, certainly better than Thunderbird.

Calendar -> Thunderbird. A little better than RSS above, but it's still not cloudy, and I haven't bothered trying to sync it with anything, although I think you can. Again, this was just the quickest way to get off Google in one swift move. I would like to find a cloudy/better solution.

Address book -> Thunderbird again. Fastmail has an addressbook, I think you get 400 contacts at my $5/year level. I haven't bothered yet. Besides, I'm using Tbird as my mail interface anyway.

Docs -> Libre Office, restructured text, my machine, DropBox and email. If you need realtime collaboration, that's going to be difficult. If you're on G+, Skud (+K Robert IIRC) has a thread on her efforts to move, and the alternatives are a couple (one?) good but cost-ish solutions; she opted to stay with Docs for now, because she collaborates with non-tech volunteers.

Picasa -> pick one. I've never been very social with pictures, email has always served me more than well enough.

If you think about it, email really is the uber-network. We should be building social networks on top of email; it's not captive, it's built on RFCs and it fucking works. I've always thought you could do a lot with imap folders.

Fastmail/Opera, there's an opportunity for you to be "the kid from nowhere ... Cinderella story." Not that you'd own the network, but you could really gain users if you led the way into social email.

Blog -> pick one. Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress, roll your own. I've had Blogger and Posterous, I'd probably go back to Posterous in the near term and eventually roll my own. Tumblr and Posterous are more than good enough. While I was still using G+ I read a few positive experiences from non-tech people migrating from Blogger to Wordpress.

Search -> DuckDuckGo. They're awesome. Their tools are numerous and literally at your fingertips. They don't track you. Their results pages are uncluttered. And if you don't see what you like, they have a link to Google search right there on the results page. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Being tracked by Google -> stay logged out of all Google services. Moving all your services out is obviously essential. Once you're no longer logging in, you aren't cookied and tracked, except for your IP when you visit a site that uses Analytics, but you can't do much about that anyway unless you want to use noscript(?).

Happy Independence Day.

Did they measure a 41% decrease of public posts? No! They measured a drop in public posts PER USER.

Moreover, this is only measured with users of manageflitter, which can hardly be considered a representative sample, so, where does all this excitement come from?

Google+ is a great product, but what I think is happening is that "social" is starting to play itself out. It's not new and fun anymore. If Google+ puts forward a mediocre showing, it won't be a result of any failure of the product, but because it was a late entrant into a game that's winding down.

(I'd like to avoid too much discussion of Real Names. As ill-advised as the RN policy may be, Facebook has a similar policy. By the way, RN is not about being "evil". It's about requiring people to use a certain utility as a social networking site and not as "something else". A Real Names policy sends the message, "We want these use patterns only". The problem is that culture is emergent and "social" can't be enforced from the top down. When you try to control culture in a heavy-handed manner, you piss people off.)

I remember when I started using Facebook. I thought I was coming in at the tail end of the thing (October 2004) although, in hindsight, it was just beginning. The product was buggy and crappy, but it filled a real need on a college campus (getting in contact with people you met briefly) and it was fun. The weekend after it came to my college, we had people in the computer labs at 4:30am using Facebook.

The bureaucratic and cultural nightmare of "Real Names" wasn't an issue on a college campus, because a non-RN profile wouldn't have been useful in Facebook's original context. There was no need for a heavy-handed policy, as non-RN profiles would just be ignored.

"Social" isn't fun anymore. It's not that interesting a space. It's about as enthralling as an electric bill. Facebook is losing U.S. activity. All of this certainly isn't Google+'s fault. It's just that people are expecting more (but the amorphous "more" consisting of people not knowing quite what they want) from social and no one has figured out how to deliver it.

My best guess is that "social" is going to be dormant and very boring for the next few years. It won't "end", but it will gradually get blander. None of the major players (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) are going to die but disruption and true innovation are going to be scant. Most efforts in "social" will be about scaling and shaving milliseconds off of latency benchmarks: important stuff, but very boring from a user's perspective. People aren't going to make friends they wouldn't otherwise make because a social networking site is 25 ms faster.

Then, there will be a radical revision of "social". It will be given a new name, as "social" has been used too much by douchebags. The disruption might come from a rogue group of "intrapreneurial" innovators within Google+ or Facebook. Or it might come from one of the lesser (but more interesting and purposeful) concerns like Meetup. Or, it might come from a startup that doesn't exist now. But I feel that there will be something exciting in social mid-decade.

What I think it will look like is a "programmable" ecosystem where people can develop their own "social" software, without having to learn complicated APIs and authentication systems. App Stores are a predecessor. Collaborative project support and multiplayer user-created games are next. Accessible and cheap "cloud computing" (i.e. relational databases that scale instead of the unmanageable horror that is sharded MySQL) will come later. My best guess is that we'll start to see the first innovations in this direction around 2013-14. What's keeping it from happening sooner is not a hard technical blockage, but a lack of interest from entrenched players. The best way to get into "social" right now and stand a chance of doing something interesting (not overnight, but in time) is to build tools that make genuinely interesting development, with low overhead and an allowance for part-time contribution, easier.