Google+ Suddenly Looks Pretty Busy For A Ghost Town | Hacker News Reader

Google+ Suddenly Looks Pretty Busy For A Ghost Town

wired.com

79 pointsAnon8435 comments

All the early adopters in my circle of friends tried it for about a month and quit in July. By quit I mean they still have accounts but no longer post content.

I closed my account about 2 weeks ago and in the form that asked me why, I cited the fact that I could not hide my name and keep my full privacy if I chose.

I think in retrospect (as I agree with the consensus that the jury is still out.) the nails in G+'s coffin will have been.

- Not allowing people to keep there name's private.

- 2 not opening to the public before facebook could implement their killer feature (only sharing things with the people I want to ala Circles)

- Lastly in some relation to the first point I think it was a huge mistake to make the 1 percent people (the extroverts who don't mind sharing with the whole world aka your Robert Scoble's and Tim O'Reilly) the cornerstone of the product.

You have to get a critical mass to gain the network effects needed to keep a social network interesting and those people can go along way but the long tail of people will prefer the ability to be more private

I keep hearing over and over that Google+ is doomed, that it is no longer being used, but each time I look at my own activity and realise I am posting more than I used to ever post before on Google+ but it is not going to everyone. I've got a circle for technical people, for college friends, for family and I can selectively post content to each one. Only rarely do I post something public and most of the time it is meant for wider consumption, or it is a link to my latest blog post.

Does Google+ have things it needs to add to become more useful? Absolutely, but I have found more engagement and user interaction on Google+ than on Facebook, mostly because I can curate the content to a specific subset of my circles thus making the content more relevant to those people, thus getting higher quality feedback from many different people.

I get higher click throughs to links on Google+ than I do on Facebook or Twitter, and I get more insightful and interesting debate on Google+ than those other two. That in my book is a win.

Facebook just rolled out this feature a few days ago. That was Google+'s major edge to me but it would have needed my whole network on it to be useful.

Now that facebook has it, it is going to be very hard to get people to use something else.

This is my experience with it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3020785

That is only for special lists. When you add someone as family member it gives you the option to add the relationship to your profile.

The other person has to agree to that, being identified as family or a coworker on your profile.

Not being put on a certain list.

The edge, for me, is that I actively want to keep FB friends and family only, but would also like a separate public persona. G+ is Twitter for people who don't know that 140 characters is a feature.

That's not really something that helps Google. They want everyone there, not just self-proclaimed 'early adopters.'

I tried to get into Google+ but there really isn't a reason to switch. I have no complaints with Facebook. They have the people I want to talk to and the features I like. They've made a lot of changes in response to G+. I now have better control over who can see which messages and I can organize my friends into lists. I really don't have the time to watch over two social networks. At this point any competitor to Facebook is going to be a hard sell.

G+ may look pretty busy right now because they opened it up for everyone but I think most people will have the same reaction I did -- it gets old quick.

Those new intelligent lists are just great.

Or creepy.

So great that the user calloc on HN had this to say about them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3018403

This is my exact experience as well, and it has completely turned me off from putting people into circles, the last thing I want is for them to have to accept or ignore some suggestion by Facebook because I dropped them in one list or another.

Facebook did improve a lot. To an ordinary user, G+ does not offer enough to convince them to switch.

In my usage G+ is not at all like Facebook.

The big difference is that Facebook is highly oriented towards "small circle of people I know in real life" and slowly opening up things to be more public.

G+ is highly oriented towards public with features to allow more private sharing. It's more like Posterous, really, than Facebook.

The concrete difference is that on Facebook I follow friends and coworkers, on G+ I follow Scoble, Tim O'Reilly, Alton Brown and other people who write interesting, public posts.

My G+ usage is pretty orthogonal to Facebook usage and is more like following blogs in an RSS reader.

>The concrete difference is that on Facebook I follow friends and coworkers, on G+ I follow Scoble, Tim O'Reilly, Alton Brown and other people who write interesting, public posts.

With Facebook's new follow feature (released this week) you can follow those people on Facebook as well.

Facebook even partially solves the Scoble problem by asking you if you want to subscribe to all, some, or only the most important posts from a person and Blake Ross has mentioned that they may be doing further things to help filter what you see on your wall (perhaps classify posts by subject?)

That is exactly what I use G+ for, it's my work life, and tech industry circle. Facebook is more for the family network where I can't really post anything about development because my cousin that works as a chef wouldn't understand. And yeah you can use lists, but now the main facebook wall feed is a potpurry of a lot of things I don't really care for.

>The concrete difference is that on Facebook I follow friends and coworkers, on G+ I follow Scoble, Tim O'Reilly, Alton Brown and other people who write interesting, public posts.

But I feel those use-cases have less overall appeal for everyday people. Everyday people want to see what their friends are up to, something facebook does very well.

>>G+ may look pretty busy right now because they opened it up for everyone but I think most people will have the same reaction I did -- it gets old quick.

We'll know by the end of the year how it works out. However, a lot of Nokia,blackberry customers used to say similar things about the iPhone when it first came out, and look what happened. So, lets not discount G+ just yet.

They have the people I want to talk to

I must have gotten precociously old and grumpy, but such phrases give me the creeps.

Despite its questionable color palette, G+ does looks nicer than Facebook.

But my stream looks like a RSS feeds more than anything, people I know IRL stopped posting months ago, pundits I follow post largely the same thing I can get elsewhere and the comments are no more interesting or constructive than say HN or Quora.

I do want to keep using it but have no idea what's the point.

"I do want to keep using it but have no idea what's the point."

Pretty much.

Twitter covers my need to follow people not within my immediate network.

And 99% of my friends primarily post on Facebook.

The feature G+ is missing the most is being able to use it to post into Facebook and Twitter. I like the idea of having an alternative to Facebook, I would love to see G+ succeed, but the real problem is the time it requires to manage multiple incompatible social network presences. The thing Google could do is to make G+ a dashboard to control all your other social accounts. I hope they realize that this is one of the biggest issues for people like myself who would like to switch but are scarce on time to completely migrate their entire social network.

Have you checked out http://sgplus.me/? I've been using it for a while to cross post from G+ to Facebook and Twitter. Works extremely well!

(although the image that pops up in Facebook is rarely the same one I picked on G+).

Thanks, will definitely check it out. Still, this is the sort of thing Google should have rolled out themselves as part of G+. Having a tool like this could be one of most significant tools for their user retention.

I prefer to use G+ to post stuff I don't want leaving a certain group (ie, pics of the kids and family, etc). I mainly share with my family circle and sometimes "tweet" links to my friends and family circle.

I have no need or time to play the Facebook game (was fun at first, but all-consuming in the end and not worthwhile).

Google+ is Facebook for grown-ups and families, and it works as designed for me. I use LinkedIn for all my work-related social networking, which pretty much covers the rest.

I am surprised by the negative comments. I admit that I only post to G+ once or twice a week, but I have some very interesting people in my circles and use G+ about as often as Twitter to find cool/useful stuff to read and experiment with.

All that said, nothing replaces owning your own domain for your content and having your blog as a sub-domain. Own and control your stuff.

Mostly my current use of web search is just searching for runtime error messages or APIs. For leads on new trends, etc. I trust the people I associate with on Twitter and G+ to point me to great tech material.

my feed is definitely still a ghost town...i think all the tech savvy people i know kind of gave up on it and people like my parents and in-laws etc are not likely to ever join.

YMMV. I'm definitely not in a ghost town over there. People like Andrea Kuszewski do a lot to generate high-quality content, and keep the conversation going. While my Facebook is more active, sure, my G+ account is where things I care about are happening.

Is it me or did the author equate new features to active users in the lead?

Yup, I got that sense too. Yes, G+ looks busy.. but throwing 1000 features and 100 programmers isn't the same as millions of active users interacting with your product. You can look busy all you want, doesn't really matter

Not sure why Wired is so pro-Google+. Their latest issue had a piece based on the premise it was a success. But I see usage levels under 1% of Facebook’s and under 5% of Twitter’s, judging by numbers on those infernal social widgets across the web (and also as observed among my friends).

Do they have some vested interest?

Is anybody else out there using, and quite liking, Diaspora? I was deeply sceptical about it until recently but it's actually pretty usable (although not bug-free).

I'm joeboy@diasp.org if you want to be in my HN aspect :-)

I gave up on G+ a while ago. Adding screen sharing, whiteboards and all of that crap isn't going to make me come screaming back. G+ just doesn't have it.

So it has the same feature set as Windows Live now ? (minus the APIs)

I've suspected for a while it would slowly turn into Live, remembering Live has a huge amount of users. It has what is technically a great feature set. But whats it worth? no one cares, its only got value on contextual levels, and I'd hazard a guess thats the future for Google+

It'll be hugely successful on paper but it will be a completely underwhelming experience when you use it... and from time to time you'll have your socks knocked off because theres something great about it.

G+ just doesn't have it.

They sure do. For an identity service that is. This is not social, it's a honeypot to get your information, or the information Google still doesn't have.

Funny, someone took a point. Must be a new Googler still going through their employee manual:)

From Eric Schmidt: " And the notion of strong identity was never invented in the Internet. Many people worked on it - I worked on it as a scientist 20 years ago, and it’s a hard problem. So if we knew that it was a real person, then we could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, we could give them things, we could you know bill them, you know we could have credit cards and so forth and so on, there are all sorts of reasons.... So the solution of course that we’ve come up with is called Google+, which is in essentially early beta, and it looks like it’s doing very well so far. It essentially provides an identity service with a link structure around your friends, similar to what I just described...."

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