Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
I've never been a fan of Facebook. I've had an account for years, but that's pretty much entirely for API testing. I can count the number of things I've posted to Facebook in the past year on one hand.
Twitter, on the other hand, I really like. It's asymmetric, and lets me engage in casual conversation with people easily.
Google+ is a great marriage between the two. Long-form posts, comment threads, rich media integration, topical conversation via hashtags, and both Twitter-style multicast (public) and more Facebook-style (circle- or individual-limited) conversation.
I realize I sound like an ad, but that's not my intent. It just works for me. The complaint I see most often is "nobody's there". If you treat it as a publishing platform, rather than an RSS reader, it becomes a lot more attractive, and then that helps to solve the "nobody's there" problem as a side-effect.
Diaspora is my social media platform of choice for the freedom it provides. When it's easy I don't mind posting to other platforms through Diaspora, which I can with Facebook and Twitter.
If someone created a way to post to Google+ from Diaspora, I would post to it from Diaspora also. (If such a way already exists, I'd love to hear of it).
I'm trying a new technique - rather than saying "Hey, join Google+! It's really cool!" to people; I'm saying "Ah, yes, Facebook... I used to be one of _those_ people."
This is something that's puzzled me. Is it the privacy implications, or just a general dislike for the company? The way I see it, it's a publishing platform for posts shorter than blog entries and longer than tweets. I read things that my friends write, and I write things for them to read. While there are games and pages and things, you don't have to use them.
I've had friends switch (switch, not start to use both) from Facebook to Google+, and treat it in exactly the same way as they treated Facebook. So I'm not sure if Google+ is better by its own merit, or just that Facebook has a bad reputation.
It wasn't very useful to me before the whole app platform thing, and after the app platform launched, it quickly became too noisy and cluttered.
No, I don't care what you had for dinner
Meanwhile Google+ makes it exceedingly easy to group people in ways that makes filtering easy, and now with the slider to let you "mix" how much from each circle appears in your full feed, I can pretty close to mute anyone that becomes obnoxious while still just being one click away from still finding out what they had for dinner.
Google+ is already more usable for me than Facebook, and they already have far better tools available to deal with an information overload that doesn't really exist there yet. I'm far more confident that as more people I know starters using Google+, I won't drown in updates I don't care about.
"Updates I don't care about" neatly summarizes why I don't like Facebook much. Maybe 1% of what I see when I log in to Facebook interests me.
I also much prefer the asymmetric relationships of Google+ - it matches the real world far better than Facebook "friends".
Facebook lets you tone down updates and the like as well. Also, have you tried managing a page with Google+ yet? Let me let you in on a secret: they did not make it very intuitive.
> A big part of it is that it is just too much work to clean up what you see to a point where I don't have to wade through massive amounts of pure junk to see anything that's interesting. > No, I don't care what you had for dinner
That's not a Facebook problem, that's a "people" problem. Whenever there are people involved, you will know what someone had for breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, etc.
Well, that shows you how little time I now spend on Facebook. Never seen that. Where is it? I still can't find the options to do that, after clicking around like crazy. Unless you mean the person by person "all/most/only important" - that's far too much hassle.
In Google+ I've toned down the number of updates from my "following" circle that I use for people I don't personally know, for example, and I don't have to remember to adjust settings for individual people when I add them to that circle. Meanwhile, if I want to see that unfiltered stream, I only need to click on that circle, not on each individual member of it.
> Also, have you tried managing a page with Google+ yet? Let me let you in on a secret: they did not make it very intuitive.
I haven't, as I've never had any interest in using it, or in following any for that matter.
Yeah, that's the one. How else would you do it? It might be more annoying since you'd have to re-organise your existing friends all at once instead of doing it when you circle them. But I did that, and now I only see things from people I actually care about.
It might be that Facebook started out as just a news feed while Google+ started out as several, so it's more intuitive for a Google+ user to tone down the updates. There are Close Friends/Acquaintances/People Near You streams on Facebook, but I keep forgetting about them.
Because Google became evil. Remember when Microsoft pre-installed IE in windows? It's the same thing when Google placed G+ in gmail.
Microsoft had 95% of desktop market share and installed IE on everyone's PC, which they claimed was part of the operating system. This essentially killed the browser competition for about a decade and Netscape got crushed.
Now how is this comparable to Google placing G+ in Gmail? Gmail is smaller than Hotmail and Yahoo Mail? They are a distant third.
Internet Explorer cannot be removed without damaging Windows or affecting other programs which depend on Internet Explorer's files. You also said yourself it is "pre-installed".
You are not required to be a Google+ user in order to use Gmail, and you obviously won't see integrations in Gmail unless you have a Google+ account.
Did you create a Google profile by accident? https://plus.google.com/settings/ , click "Delete profile and remove associated Google+ features". Voila, done. Your Gmail is pristine and the chip on your shoulder has surely vanished.
Facebook is full of human beings sharing their lives - Google+ is full of jerks who see Facebook as an API. Friend that? No thanks.
- I dislike 'social networks' in general. They tend to look messy to me, they seem to try too hard to match me with this guy, connect me with that, make me follow one group and post to another. Arguably FB is worse right now, but I see the trend in G+ as well. RSS (and, occasionally Twitter) is good enough for reading for me. Mail and IM (GTalk, ironically) is enough for contacting the people around me.
- Privacy. I do have a Facebook account, mostly to stay in contact with some friends back in Germany. I tried to lock down the account as much as possible regarding privacy settings and my list of friends contains ~40 - well - friends (or family). I don't 'collect' friends and have no 'friends'.
- The combination of my mail(sort of, reduced that a lot already)/contacts/calendar/IM (hi, Android) provider with a 'You need to provide an ID if we feel like it'/'We delete your stuff if we feel like it'/'Pseudonyms are not wanted here' attitude social network seems scary. For one because I don't trust the 'plus' part of Google any single bit by now. And in addition I'd throw a large amount of extra free data about myself at a company that already collects far too much - for no benefit.
- It's full of bull.. Maybe it's me, but I had an account in the past, tried to follow interesting persons and ended up with pseudonym noise (people that were interesting being deleted, everyone discussing about this policy etc) or animated gif images. It was more 4chan than anything else - and I really tried hard to block people after the first 1-2 'offenses'.
- I loved the idea of circles, that is until I started to use them. The metaphor seemed nice at first, but it became frustrating after I moved past the first 20-30 contacts.
1: Actually I tend to reserve the word hate for things that - well - are actually of importance. 'I hate X' where X is a thing or a person I temporarily disagree with seems inflationary use of the term 'hate'.
Let me begin by saying I don't hate it, I just see it as a poor decision as Google+ allows Google to make a verified and robust profile of me for sale or subpoena, while giving me very little more than what facebook already offers. (Keeping in mind that while the USA already has low-requirements for digital subpoenas, it's still heading towards a completely warrantless-everything approach for digital information.)
G+ picks up where GMail and Google Analytics weren't able to go:
- It will have my full name (with google killing off accounts that were using pseudonyms.)
- It has my phone number and contacts: With a Google+ on my phone it has access to my contacts, geographic location and phone number.
- It follows me around the web far better than what Analytics was able to achieve.
- It follows me around real life: It can know what I'm doing and where I'm doing it, even if it has nothing to do with the web such as tagging, GPS-photos from all current era mobile devices, events and location based ("geo-everything") services.
Then when I include other google-owned services such as search, maps, youtube & blogger. I'm left placing a huge amount of information and trust in a company that has a business model defined by profiling me, a history of providing information to the USA government (don't forget Chinese hacking) and a track record of storing more than what I bargained for (such as Google Desktop) with the later landing them in hot water with the EFF.
I take pause because I live in a country where there was raging debate about combining the profiles from various government run services as it gives the government an orwellian-like power over it's citizens (they remained separate). Plus it provides an obvious target for those looking to abuse the data. When you consider that in the judicial system, a judge must approve the fishing and combining of this sort of information, I'm not about to hand over the same level of information to a company free from oversight.
If this is at all representative, I suspect the percentage of active users to total users is pretty abysmal.
Although G+ still has way fewer posts than Facebook, I suspect that it would need a much higher post rate than Facebook to appear as "active" to users.
I find G+ posts to be generally of much higher quality, especially shared things.
I had a linkedin account for years before I paid any attention to it. Eventually the emails started rolling in to engage me.
I bet that in the early days of Facebook & Twitter, they were not releasing their number of active users either.
I remember when I signed up for Facebook in 2007. None of my friends were there. They were still on Friendster.
History should teach us a lesson that growing a social network takes time.
it's not comparable.
that being said I think their rate of growth is very good. i also like the G+ UI a lot more, it's pretty good.
The only thing I dislike is that it's one more thing that Google fully control and doesn't really open up.
Note that I actually dislike both for privacy reasons as well.
I like how Google PR is working hard to spread the message, but I ain't seeing what they are selling. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to see FB have some competition. But G+ isn't cutting it as yet.
My question is more targetted at all those people that (had to) make an account for w/e reason, but just don't open it anymore. I can only assume they are included too, are there estimates to their numbers?
Edit: I do use Google+, I just notice a lot of (seemingly?) 'dead' accounts.
I still use it fairly actively, though.
This thing has largely failed outside of tech circles and twitter style (celebrity) newsfeeds at the moment. Hopefully that will change, as I find it superior to Facebook in virtually every way.
My biggest issue with it is the lag, which is ironic for a product by Google. Sometimes it takes 30+ seconds for images to load. This significantly affects the user experience, since I usually don't wait, I just move onto something else.
I know a lot of people use Facebook for messaging, but I would honestly prefer that they just email. I don't really see the advantage of a non-email email over just using email. Google+ email and chat integration are just fine.
You don't have to manually put people into their own circles. If you share something, just start typing their name (instead of a circle name) and it will let you share with individuals instead of circles. It works the same way otherwise.
I find the slowness surprising, actually. Whenever I've used + it always seems either the same or faster than Facebook. Perhaps this has to do with specific network environments or something? I have noticed that it takes a while for updates to propagate (caching, I guess) across to other users. That part is a little annoying at times.
Latency is definitely something we care about.
Typical of what I see. This is a fresh Firefox profile, no cache, no extensions. It's also not a network problem, since I don't see this on other sites, even other Google properties like search or Gmail. It's unique to G+
Two quick follow-up questions: On that screenshot, it looks like it's the main profile picture and the profile picture thumbnails for the circles that are slow to load (but the images from the stream are loaded). Is that typically what you see, or is that just what happened in this case?
Do have a sense for whether this happens more often when you're looking at profiles of people who are in a lot of circles (like Tim O'Reilly)?
Thanks for your help.
Is there something specific you're looking for? I could pass it on to the product managers.
If we apply this to google+, then it would be 18 million active users if the 60MM is to be believed. That being said, no numbers of active users have been announced so there is no way to know.
Spammers have learnt their lesson and now know age is a factor in deciding if it's a spam account or not and are getting in early and big.
A new account that immediately starts posting a lot is a big red flag. An old, active account that slowly ramps up posting volume is likely a lot harder to distinguish from a "real" user that is getting more active as the service gets bigger.
So you slowly build up a big portfolio of accounts and keep them "warm", and then spread your spamming over a larger volume of accounts instead of trying to create new ones and pump out lots of spam faster than they can block you.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!
By this measure, Google+ is at 25% of Facebook. I remember when Google+ went into 'anybody-can-use-it' mode a few months ago it was only around 5%. This suggests Google+ is doing quite nicely, thank you. But perhaps it is just showing how Google+ is becoming more popular with spammers...?
I made a new Gmail account for my mom a few days, now she has a Google+ account too but I doubt she'll ever touch it.
>> More than 800 million active users
>> More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
>> On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day
etc.
I'm more then willing to believe that there were 625K+ users for Dec 25 and 26 though to extrapolate users for all of 2012 based on xmas day and the day after xmas sign ups of 2011 is absurd.
Interest in google plus is fairly flat:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%22google%20plus%22...
For comparison's sake that is 10% of twitter and twitter is 10% of facebook.
This is the blog post announcing open signups and it is dated September 20th: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96...
It's actually rather telling when the only way to make Google+ sound popular is to count meaningless automatic signups.
Facebook long changed the game by reporting actives. Since, startups like twitter and foursquare have followed suit by reporting actives. It is very apparent what google's refusal to report actives means.