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Comment by timdorr | Hacker News Reader

Users are one thing, active users are another. How many posts are being made? Are they just signing up for these accounts and never coming back? There's a reason Facebook and Twitter quote active users when announcing how many people are actually using their products.

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Indeed. I know lots of people who signed up for G+ to check it out, I only know two people who still actively post to it. I just checked my news feed, and it's entirely filled with posts by celebs (famous photographers, web celebs, Google folks I follow, etc), and two posts by my actual friends.

If this is at all representative, I suspect the percentage of active users to total users is pretty abysmal.

It's definitely way more barren on G+ than Facebook, but I think that part of this is because on G+, users are more likely to make posts that can only be seen by a small subset of the total number of users in their circles. On Facebook, most users still make posts visible to everyone on their friends list. I personally have a "close friends" circle of about 15 people and we typically just share content with each other; at the same time I'm seeing posts from people outside of this circle talking no one ever posts to G+.

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 think you have a really good point about circles being smaller, a side effect of publishing only to certain circles will result in less updates seen, no matter how we try to slice it.

I find G+ posts to be generally of much higher quality, especially shared things.

I believe quality of the posts depends on the quality of the people... I had(since I deactivated both Facebook and G+ accounts of mine) nearly the same sets of friends both on Facebook and Google+ the last time I checked them, and the quality of the posts were nearly the same. Actually, most of them were posting the same things to both platforms.

I accidentally created an account during Android phone activation, as it was very unclear (already had one on other account and didnt want another). They could get up to 700k a day like this, maybe this is most of them.

Were you activating a Galaxy Nexus? So far as I know, pre-Ice Cream Sandwich Android releasesare also pre-Google+, so they don't prompt you for anything Google+-related during setup.

Yes it was a galaxy nexus. Guess they may not be able to back port this then...

Not sure what he did, but i activated my Galaxy Nexus yesterday and it's pretty much the same procedure as with the Nexus One and other Stock Android ROMs.. It's only asking for your Google Account, and since that includes you G+ account there is no seperate "create/login with G+" in the setup procedure. Wouldn't even make sense..

Yes, active users would be better. It's still useful though to have users registered. At some point it'll hit critical mass and that bar at the top of the page will start lighting up with notifications.

I had a linkedin account for years before I paid any attention to it. Eventually the emails started rolling in to engage me.

LinkedIn is probably a good comparison. I too heard about it years and years ago, but only got around to signing up for it this year. I figure Google+ will be similar for most people, as long as Google keeps the updates coming like they have been.

Exactly. In the month of December, exactly 2 out of my G+ contacts made an update; and of them, only 1 updated more than once. Compare this to FB, where people add updates at least once a day or two.

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.

Well, if they've been adding 500k per day, they have a lower bound of about 15 million monthly actives.

Yes. For example, the Facebook numbers are always number of people who've logged in at least once in the last 28 or 30 days (or something) -- I'm sure the G+ people are computing this internally. The fact they don't report it implies it may be a bit low?

Oh but its just a google login, most people will have one. You need to measure views or posts...

Not quite. There's a difference between Google accounts that are "switched on" for Google+ and those that are not. These days also you need to do is sign into Google+ with your Google account to flip the switch, but there is still a distinction.

If you are signed in to google for any reason(gmail, docs, etc.) and are a G+ user you are signed in to G+. They put a G+ specific notification area on the black bar across the top. I would hope active user meant something more than signed up and has checked their gmail account at least once in the past 28 days.

True dat. I have a mere ~30 peeps in my circles, most of joined early but are not tech geeks. The latest months only ONE of them has been posting sporadically.

Give them a break. It's been out for just 6 months.

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.

FB or twitter don't have the registration right on google.com itself, or the like.

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.

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