Larry Page: Google+ now has 90 million users globally
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
None of my friends are on Google+. But there are tons of really smart people that I don't know personally (although I wish I did), who post lots of great content for me to read, and consider and discuss. With this personal experience in mind, I believe the 60% are using it as a content discovery platform, not so much as a social network.. sort of like another Reddit/Twitter
However I'm not sure how most users will feel about associating their online activity/searches with their social network.
Although all of these actions interact with G+, only few are true metrics of social network success. The key is to drive _social_ interaction, to be the #1 resource of where you friends and family interact. I think G+ still has a wall to climb in that sense.
Let's not forget their average visit length:
http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/6a00d83451b36c69e...
I have a lot of hope for G+ but this reminds me of the premature "Mission Accomplished" banner.
do you happen to have a link for the article that graphic comes from? thanks!
Who knew that leveraging a near monopoly by bundling your product could give you access to a new market?
Ergo facebook is not a monopoly.
It's ironic that I would have to define monopoly here - I personally have a great deal of distaste for facebook's actions. In my opinion they engage in highly deceptive business practices. Their users are unaware of the damage to their privacy stemming from facebook's actions.
But unethical or distasteful practices do not imply a monopoly. Google does not have a monopoly either - if you prefer not to use their services, use Bing or Baidu or DuckDuckGo ...
I understand that facebook and google embed javascript on other pages. So download the requestpolicy firefox addon. Or disable javascript. And cookies. I think you can see my point: you, the customer, can spend your money and your bandwidth (= money) other places if you prefer.
That's not what a monopoly is. By that definition, no company has ever been a monopoly.
Many people and businesses have no choice but to use Windows. It's nearly impossible to buy a computer without Windows, especially if you're picky about configurations. Even if the choice exists (Apple), switching involves considerable costs: buying all new hardware, moving to different application software, retraining personel, dealing will legacy and proprietary file formats.
In contrast, moving to a different search engine is easy and free. There are no barriers to switch.
Downmodding us adds almost nothing to the discussion.
* I think this is the case with ICS, less sure if it's the case for the Gingerbread phones that form the vast majority of Android devices sold.
On the right there is "People and Pages on Google+ related to facebook" acting like a gigantic advertisement for Google+.
Given how many people type searches into Google instead of typing in the URL, it doesn't shock me that Google has managed to convert so many people..
...I think this is the case with ICS"
A Google+ account is created from any account I use to log into ICS? Have you a link which confirms this?
I use a pseudonymous account on my Android phone.
After branching out to my immediate interest areas (tech), a little later I ended up adding Philip Plait (bad astronomy guy), Fraser Cain and other sciencey/astronomy folks. The amazing Hangouts that these folks do a number of times/week makes me feel really lucky to have access to such a resource. Certainly having some degree of access to experts in assorted fields is nothing new thanks to the internets, but G+ has, in my view, made such interactions far more accessible.
I can only imagine that there are other groups doing awesome things with G+ who I have not yet found.
In the last few months, I have noticed many HN posts linking to Google+ posts. G+ is becoming a strong blogging platform and because Google is pushing rel=author so hard, soon it won't matter WHERE you wrote it (domain), it will matter WHO wrote it (author). That's why I see A+ bloggers adopting G+ soon.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's possible to do a reddit search for submitted links to a particular domain if you're looking for more details. (I'm a little hesitant to link directly to a bunch of reddit pages here. Don't want to step on anyone's toes.)
Anyway, it's not like G+ posts are exceeding imgur links or anything. It just seems that based on my completely non-scientific observations, I'm seeing G+ posts linked more frequently than previously (or perhaps I'm just looking out for them more often ;)).
Maybe I'm just getting cynical..
Perhaps the people I know are just atypical (non)users, but I sort of doubt it.
(UPDATE: We've confirmed what some readers suspected: the 60 and 80 percent figures refer to users accessing any Google service—whether it be search, Gmail or something else—while logged in to their Google account, and do not necessarily indicate actual usage of Google+ each day or week. The 90 million figure refers not to active users, but to the total number of people who have created Google+ accounts.)
My stream on fb is fairly informative and useful.
The fact that they're starting to throw up weasel words tells me that the "60% daily engagement rate" figure might not be exactly what you think it means. I'd be much more interested if they'd tell us exactly how many people log in and at least view their timeline every day. I'm not interested in how many people hit personalized search every time they do a search because they happen to be logged in.
I know some folks are saying there's a lot of fake accounts on G+ but I think that's true for the same percentage, if not more across all social networks.