Robert Scoble calls G+'s "ghost town" reputation "unfair ... simply wrong"
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
If you want real hard evidence that G+ is a ghost town (in that nobody uses it):
Robert Scoble posted a video yesterday: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJY... and that video got 778 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLhi1VUbmc).
Out of 1,500,000 "followers" on Google+ less than 1,000 take notice of his posts. That's even worse than Twitter.
Photo gallery from his son's graduation, +135 and 31 comments.
Video (that I posted above), +107 with 17 comments.
Video of "Engagio", +40 with 8 comments.
He has 1,500,000 followers and his best post gets ~300 +1's and ~60 comments, the average post gets ~100 +1s and ~30 comments. The only reason the post about G+ not being a ghost town is popular is because it was spread around the internet (eg: HN) and it's flame bait...
> on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written
And will you actually pay attention to it? Consume the content? If you're not watching the videos he posts or reading his writing you're not engaged. Less than 1,000 people out of 1,500,000 people clicked on his video, they didn't even need to watch it for a view to count, just click on it. How can you claim for one second that he has an engaged audience when less than 0.05% of his audience click his video. I have better engagement than that on Twitter and Facebook and I'm some no-name internet guy.
If the engagement levels for posts are less than 1% I don't think it can be considered active at all. Follower counts are meaningless, I think the majority of "Social Media" sites get it wrong: someone that followed me 4 years ago probably isn't still (actively) following me today, but if follower counts only reflected actively engaged users people like Scoble would cry because it doesn't validate their whole "I'm super popular hire me" shtick.
I've said it before, Scoble is a part of the Mashable type of Social Media, people subscribe that don't really care about what he says they just follow/subscribe because of what he represents: Social Media. They feel that to be relevant in Social Media they have to follow Scoble, just like they have to read Mashable. They don't care about them or engage with their content, they just subscribe so they can say they do. Mashable has 2.6m Twitter followers, tweets an article and gets 6 comments. Worthless.
On the other hand look at the stats of true tech luminaries like Linus Torvalds: thousands of likes, hundreds of reshares and comments per post. Torvalds is the kind of guy - with nothing technologically left to prove - that the G+ community enjoys following very closely. There is no way your G+ stream can be a ghost town if you follow people like Torvalds and far lesser luminaries (but greatly accomplished folks) on G+.
There are a few things which I think are better indicators of engagement than comments-on-a-post / followers.
1) I would instead look at how many people he engaged with over the lifetime of his G+ activity. Or if you insist on analysing individual posts, then try to determine what percentage of the segment that the post was intended for responded to the post in some way. I bet not all of his 1.5 million followers are American, or iPhone users, or Android developers, or photographers... or any number of factors you could use to segment your audience.
2) How are you comparing your chosen metrics to other platforms? Does Twitter or Facebook have better or worse engagement? I just checked out his Facebook profile and that same Golden Gate National Cemetery that got him a measly 54 comments on G+, earned him only 2 comments on Facebook (one of which was Scoble's reply to the first and really the only comment). So while he seems to be getting even crappier results on Facebook, I don't think anyone could say that Facebook is a ghost-town. Perhaps it would be valid to say that internet just sucks for marketing in general... But here's a hint: In my 9-5 I am both an internet and a traditional marketer (I sell subscriptions). I can assure you that all my cost-per-order analyses heavily favour the adwords/social/SEO/e-mail campaigns to the direct-mail/fax/telemarketing campaigns. (I sell a low value product so maybe this is why my CPO leans this way. If you sell $1K-$10K products you might find that nothing replaces a phone call for value)
3) You cannot look at a single point in time and make a judgement call. You should look at the trend-changes over a longer period of time. Skate where the puck is going to be and all that jazz.
4) Quality of engagement is important too. A response which consists of at least one or two sentences that add something meaningful to the discussion and illicit another response from somebody else is a 100 times more valuable then an endless stream of "Cool! Thanks for posting."
http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2012/05/note-about-recent...
> Google has never announced how they count views. They have announced that recommended videos are suggested based on the % of videos watched. I would think some of that same technology is being used in the view count.
What do you mean? Surely there is no magical technology or algorithms behind view count? "If a unique user watches a video increment the counter by 1" why would they need anything more complex than this?
I know there is a lot of abuse protection but I'm not sure how this fits in with my assertion that 1 click = 1 view. There was a bug a few months back with Youtube that didn't apply anti-abuse checking to Mobile views (viewing a video from a mobile device) and a group of blackhat people abused this and sold views: they would view a video 1,000,000 times as if it was being viewed from a mobile device and Youtube would count 1,000,000 views, even if it was all from the same IP.
I'm not sure how it's debatable that if 800 people click on a Youtube video link then 800 views will be counted, what reason would they have for not counting 800 views if 800 people clicked on it?
Total data transferred to unique IPs / size of the video.
Because the logs are all over the place (CDNs), it takes about 1 day for the view count to be updated.
This is a more accurate and abuse proof way of counting "views". Your simple "1 click = 1 view" is abuse prone, which is why it is not done this way.
can you expand on this? Do you mean that if the video is 1MB and 200 UNIQUE IPs download 500kb each it will count as 100 views?
Although this would be better it's not what they do. I'm a Youtube Partner and from the analytics I have access to I can see that no matter how long a user watches for a view is counted, otherwise they would not be able to provide "user retention" statistics.
"Absolute audience retention helps you see how often each moment of your video is being watched as a percentage of total views. Rewinding and rewatching can result in values of higher than 100%"
For example, the developers and researchers of compilers for functional programming languages are there and active, but scrolling through the posts, I've noticed that all of us (myself included) tend only to make the posts visible to other compiler developers.
Trying to think about why that is, I can only assume it's because of the background knowledge problem. If I want to talk about random things I'm doing in our compiler to this group, I can just type up a thousand words. If I wanted to do it publicly and have it understandable, I'd have to make a Matt Might-style blog post, and the only way I would do that is if, like him, I was already preparing the contents for undergraduate consumption. Or maybe if it was content I had prepared for a paper that was too introductory and had to be cut due to page restrictions.
Nowadays, I circle specific people if (1) they circled me and look interesting, or (2) if I see interesting posts from them reshared a lot. I don't need more in my stream; I miss too much in it as it is.
Your followers who aren't included might be miffed at being excluded, but at least they'd see that stuff is going on on G+ even if they can't see it. If nothing else, that'd reduce the ghost town feel.
I have no idea who R. Scoble is and just by peaking at his profile I have to say that I have no interest in following him. This is probably why most people that use Twitter don't fit in the G+ space. As far as I'm concerned most technical Twitter users are Web developers, the SEO (crap) crowd, designers, social media whores, guys posting about hipster bands. Not to generalize but that's how I see it and the reason Twitter is a ghost town for me, Facebook is useless and G+ is awesome. To each his own.
I would love to get into this circle. Do these people share publicly? Where can a person hang out to meet the people who are in these circles?
Twitter, on the other hand, I spend my whole days there. It doesn't get as many clickthroughs to my blog, but it's magnificent for chatting with people and keeping in touch with interesting people I would like to get to know (rather than those I already know).
As for FB ... there is still nothing better for organizing group events between scatterbrained friends.
Are you part of the HN circle, by any chance?
The circles were generated from a list at http://hngp.axxim.net/, but that seems to be offline now.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109572812341174932454/posts/5D2y...
Orphans of Flickr now go to Picasa and 500px (the G+ photo album imports from Picasa Web IIRC)
G+ are definitely an improvement over Picasa but it still doesn't feel right
What the hell is that? If you wanted to share you G+ profile (say, to a friend in a bar) would you have to spell this god-knows-how-much-long id, or is there a better way (like, plus.google.com/robert_scoble) that I'm not aware of (of course, without using url shorteners)?
Which is an antipattern, and a smell of some sort.
I liked that on Google Profiles I could pick my own alias, I happened to make it the same as my email address @gmail.com but there was still a choice. The number used now is not nearly as comprehensible, I hope they reintroduce something like the profiles.google.com stuff.
I also find that to regularly get new content on G+ I have to follow lots more people than I do on Twitter. People seem to post a lot less frequently on G+ (a lot of people only post a few times a week). This is a problem for me because unlike Scoble I don't want to manage circles with tens of thousands of people. Eventually that will get unmanageable and unlike Scoble management of my social media accounts isn't part of my job.
As for circle management, I've never had an issue with that. I follow 2k people and I just wait for someone to get annoying before I uncircle them. If they're never annoying, don't post, or whatever, then I don't notice and it's no skin off my back. I just circle people with interesting streams and just watch it come in. I haven't adjusted my circles since August or so when I made one to share to.
Twitter is the ghost town not G+ and he brought some impressive figures proving that.
I don't know if he's right, I reduced time in all networks but Twitter is slightly before G+:
- FB 1-5 times/day
- Instagram 1-5 times/week
- LinkedIn 1-2 times/week
- Twitter once per week (at max)
- G+ never
- Path never
I think his large number of followers on G+ is a result of his very early engagement on G+ spamming the network around the clock. Moreover, the Twitter audience is not a perfect match for Scoble—his posts have a special style, verbose and opinionated and obviously don't appeal to the typical Twitter user (tech and Internet savvy who are often better informed than Scoble himself).
Facebook is a tricky one, since it promotes addictive "stalking" behavior. I've attempted to use it primarily for messaging and to hide most people who aren't in my immediate vicinity, thinking that I probably don't need to know what they are doing. Still, I am a part of "liking" tribes where there is an implicit economy of trading likes on something and receiving likes back.
G+ I only use when I get annoying messages from Google that someone has asked me a question or added me to some circle. Other than that I avoid it like the plague -- this despite being an enthusiastic adopter in the early days.
LinkedIn I use probably once a month, except in the occasional moments where I am actively networking. I get very little value here since I am not usually looking for work and the technical folks I interact with are available on Twitter (or, at worse, email).
To anyone looking at my twitter, it might seem extremely quiet and ghost-townish, but I am using Twitter much more than Facebook and getting more from it, albeit passively.
FB/G+ feel far more involved, even if I'm doing the same thing. I chalk this up to the conversations being longer, and more in depth/nuanced.
My twitter account /looks/ like a ghost town, in that I never do anything on it myself. But I'm using it to follow a bunch of feeds I'm interested in; I check it regularly. I'm not sure how an outside observer could tell the difference between the two, other than by counting logins - but for me, twitter is useful, and G+ is dead.
People there don't post they have been wasted yesterday or they ate a mayonnaise sandwich. They share relevant news. I don't check facebook much anymore...
Everyone I know is on Facebook, and nearly everyone is on Twitter (with more joining just this week.) I have a large group of friends from a web community that all joined G+ at the same time, so, it's a completely valid social network for me, without having to do any work of reorganizing friends from high school who add me.
Basically, for me it's a second chance at adding people on a social network, and this time, with easier tools, I'm getting it right.
The great thing about G+ is that in this large group of strangers there is a huge number of tech (and other) luminaries who are actively engaging on the network. Circle them and you basically get a stream of comments, thoughts, links and pictures that are really worth following. I've only circled about a 100 or so of these "strangers" and I've just loving the interaction. Sure, nobody (or very few) +1 anything I have to say, but that doesn't bother me as I'm far more interested in what they have to say. No way you can call it a ghost town when you engage in G+ this way.
On the other hand, if you circle nobody then it does become a ghost town. But it would hardly be fair to call it one.
The 'average Joe' doesn't have any use for this. They can follow their friends on Facebook or follow their favorite celebrities on Twitter.
So, when I read Scoble's comments about having more followers on G+ than anywhere else, I believe it … and I also believe more than half of them aren't regularly using G+, either.
But if the scientists in your NASA circle want to post vacation pictures, you can't filter that out. You can try and get yourself included into their "Space News Only" circle, which would solve the problem, but badgering people who don't know you to do something for you, even little like this, isn't an optimal solution.
But for whatever its worth, I've started to really like G+ since I've started to follow Linus Torvalds and Stephen Kinsella on G+. I like the drag-drop UI that "Circles" tab/widget implements and I love the posts that Linus shares with the public. I don't know if Linus has/uses FB too, but I don't care.
I think that if Google runs G+ long enough and has cool & intelligent people using/developing it, G+ will not do too bad.
The average Facebook user uses it as a tool to keep in touch with family and friends. Google+ is a ghost town for most new users, a few of my non techie friends joined Google+ when it first launched and haven't been back since because their friends are still using Facebook. Scoble and most Google+ users are outliers. The majority of users want a social network to share with their friends and they are not interested in following a bunch of random people.
Posting to your circles is the lists that you have created, he's not curating lists of >1million people. There isn't any way to limit the visibility of a post just to people who are following you on google+
so much for googles open web approach: "public" != publicly available if you are logged in to google+
Item 2 there claims blockers can view public posts, which seems the intended behavior.
I've been using Livejournal since 2002 and have about 350 followers. I think maybe a hundred of them are still commenting on my posts intermittently. (Yeah, I still use LJ.)
I got on G+ when it came out. I have 232 followers. I think maybe three of them reply to my posts. Sometimes. (Not that I post to G+ a lot but still.)
That's a hell of a lot of followers in about eight months versus like 5-6 years of LJ being a pretty active place. It's not the 1.5mil Scoble has but it's a hell of a lot for someone who never posts, but seems to see a new follower every day.
I would also compare and contrast the age and follower count of my Twitter account, but I'm pretty sure a large percentage of my nearly 600 followers there are spambots or marketroids, and I don't feel like guesstimating how many actual humans are following my tweets.
Perhaps if Google embraced (and re-branded) itself as a content network/social content network/RSS reader with glowing bells things would be understood (and talked about) differently.
Facebook wins for the former as most of my friends still aren't on G+ or twitter, however, most of the activity is uninteresting checkins and the like.
With twitter, I have followed people I am interested in for topical content, but I mostly see personal tweets and find myself quickly scrolling through them for an occasional interesting link. Also, the interaction is next to zero except for retweets. I don't think the medium lends itself to much more than light banter.
In contrast, on plus, the topical content is more informative often with interesting comments.
This is also the natural evolution of social networks - when they start the social media guys are the most followed because they are the most active, then they are eclipsed by true celebrities. Scoble added 30k followers on twitter in 3 months - Howard Stern added 150k in the same time frame, Rihanna added 5M followers.
I, like most others take an opposite stance on the matter that G+ indeed is a ghost town.
Bashed Google+ a couple of days after it was launched : http://on.fb.me/LtMkTN
(of course it's not desert for him: his follower count is the closest approximation to G+'s total user count)
Some of those writing are just parroting PR pitches and some just seem to depend on their limited experience with he service.
Also considering that the number of active users is but a fraction of the overall number of those who signed up (yet still a considerable amount) it's not fair to divide active minutes between all registered users. It might be a "ghost town" in comparison to Facebook but so is every other social service the tech blogs seem to be paddling, it's just that + is a bigger target for PR attacks.
A lot of people are in the situation where they're going to have to be on Facebook no matter what (hello lock-in), and they'd really rather not have to be on Google+ at the same time. It'd be all the annoying parts of social networking doubled, plus the hassle of maintaining two copies of a lot of information, with no significant advantages.
I think a lot of people who disparage Google+ would have no major objection if it could quickly take over from Facebook and become the new monopoly. However, by this point it seems unlikely, barring a major event.
A world where social networking services could interoperate, sort of like how we have numerous telephone companies but one global namespace of phone numbers, would be interesting.