Google+ grows 43% in June
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
I've said this before and I'll say it again; using Compete for quantitative traffic comparisons is flawed, particularly with social sites that utilize embeddable content. Their data has been proven wrong countless times. Until recently, Compete claimed Reddit (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/) had less traffic than Digg (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/).
I don't have anything against Google+. But lets hold off on the congratulatory praise until we're sure the growth is real.
Compete, Alexa, etc. they're all tracking people who don't understand technology.
That would mean that G+ is even stronger as it seems mainly popular with the tech crowd.
Specifically, those that have them installed are more likely to be non-tech users than those without.
That's my guess with 0 data to back it up (but plenty of useless anecdotes!)
The comparing reddit/digg on compete doesn't make much sense because of the digg button penetration. Just like comparing linkedin to google plus is stupid because many google properties make requests to plus.google.com.
Compete is a valuable tool, you just need to learn how to use it appropriately. Learn when it is reasonable to compare sites using it.
According to one of Google's own services, google+ is pretty much dead:
http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=google+plus&graph=wee...
compare with fb:
http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=facebook&graph=weekly...
edit: thank you downvoters for illustrating the bias on HN. A fake stats piece promoting google as #1 on the frontpage? This place is turning into /. but with more google employees. I'm out.
If that were the case, Mitt Romney should start a social network because he's crushing Facebook: http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=romney&graph=weekly_i...
http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=romney,+facebook&grap...
red=fb, blue= romney
The reason this is relevant in the discussion is that when you type in the url in chrome (arguably the top browser) the word in the domain and subdomain count as search words that show up in trends. So when you type "plus" for the g+ url it's added to trends. You can check that little fact by looking at the trends for "plus".
MySpace is so small now! And shrinking! Let us never forget that history.
Tumblr and pinterest are adding a lot fewer users than I thought.
Gosh just look at the page. Google+ looks very clean and beautiful compared to Facebook these days. I'm reminded of when everybody used to say "Facebook looks very clean and beautiful compared to MySpace these days".
Google has a big leg up here as Google+ ads can always be less intrusive and more relevant than Facebook ones. They can also afford to be cleaner by simply not making much (if any) money off of Google+ itself, just on the fact that it gets you into the google ecosystem.
One thing that really bothers me about new Google web properties is that Google made this browser, Google Chrome, with a search functionality that highlights the matched words in orange on the scrollbar. Then they went and broke this feature on every single scrollbar possible by using custom scrollbars on every Google web property except Google search itself. How silly!
---
Back to the topic at hand. I love the format of Google+ compared to Facebook. It sits between blog and social network, and long-form posts and answers seem much more natural and acceptable on G+ than on Facebook.
Think about it. Lots of people link to Google+ posts here. Nobody links to the equivalent Facebook thing, wall posts. (And extremely few people use Facebook "notes" which were an attempt to fill that gap and have falled by the wayside.) I think this is one of the most telling things of all.
I think Google+ has great opportunity for it to mature into more than just a social network, but a social network + blog for those who cant be bothered to make (and visit!) traditional blogs + interactive press release platform (important for both companies and users).
I don't know if G+ will "win" any long term battle, but I do hope that when social networks mature into more refined, less annoying versions of themselves, they will look more like G+ than like Facebook or MySpace. I think the trend is clear, anyway.
Both of them are terrible on mobile.
On the flip side, the Facebook mobile experience is pretty terrible as well, but Facebook already has quite a large (and growing) user base already, so I wonder if mobile user experience is as important to growth as is existing, for lack of a better word, penetration.
EDIT: Just noticed this line from the post: "The Compete numbers are US only and desktop only."
[1] http://drift.io
That's a bit misleading, because one of the few places G+ has gotten traction is among developers, mostly in the Google ecosystem (go figure). That's a big and important ecosystem, so it's not shocking that people from there would post stuff that occasionally is of interest to HN.
Facebook wall posts aren't used in the same way by the tech crowd -- probably mostly because they didn't work like blog posts or G+ posts until after G+ launched -- so they don't get HN links. But in other communities people definitely link to wall posts. I work in politics and it's not unusual to see a politico use their Facebook wall as a kind of proto-blog. (Sarah Palin, or some nameless flack on her team at least, is/was a master at this.) It then gets plenty of links from political media.
I remember the same about Twitter, most users were devs and rails devs at that. Doesn't mean G+ will be as successful as Twitter though.
It focuses on vanity metrics rather than engagement or retention. A lot is written on that topic, so I won't repeat (see Tim Ferris: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/05/19/vanity-metri...). This article is excellent optimization for link baiting.
And it doesn't matter because most of these sites don't compete against each other. Each of these media sites has a different value prop, target demo and potential ARPU. For example, the value of a unique visitor on LinkedIn is way higher than on Tumblr, but it's a moot point because they aren't going after the same users (sure there will be some overlap, but that's in the same way that I visit HN and FB).
Second, these stats are utterly wrong.
Tumblr had 133M global uniques in that time, according to quantcast [1]. Pinterest had 45.8M US uniques around then [2]. And this completely ignores their quickly growing mobile traffic. Quantcast directly measures traffic by pixeling sites, so I trust their data over Compete in this case.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%20Plus%2CIns...
Everything else you listed doesn't have any common aliases.
However if you double the result volume to account for Google Plus and Google+ it's still unimpressive. More importantly the curve is flat for both.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%20Plus%2CGoo...
Page views is a much better metric for this kind of thing - anyone who is engaged is not going to search for it more than once.
Page view data we have is, frankly, terrible. If Google wants to prove to the world what a huge success G+ they could do this in 10 seconds by giving us some pageview, photo, post, etc stats. The fact that they don't do this is telling.
"anyone who is engaged is not going to search for it more than once."
That's equally true or many other services and yet they trounce G+ both in absolute and trend.
From the linked article:
During the Google I/O Conference in June, Google’s Vic Gundotra announced that the Google+ mobile traffic is now larger than the desktop traffic. Gundotra also announced that Google+ has 250 million accounts, 150 million active users during a month and 75 million active daily users.
So there is that.
The fact that they don't do this is telling
Facebook has never given number any more detailed than the ones Gundotra gave.
I'm not seeing any detailed statistics - actually I can't even see the known publicly available numbers.
Do you have a direct link?
All this does is confirm that G+ isn't growing organically, it's growing only because it's default on for most new Android and Gmail users.
Claiming all these people as G+ users is only slightly less disingenuous then say if Apple came out tomorrow claiming that iCloud was the hottest new social network.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%20Plus%2CG%2...
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%20Plus%2CIns...
Absolutely dwarfs everything else. I'm not buying that G+ has 1/5 of the MAU's of Facebook
The implementation of Google+ Platform on websites seems to have plateaued recently, meaning, if these stats are correct, the visitors are probably not coming in from the web, they may be being coerced in from other Google products.
http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/Google-Plus-One-Platform
Disclaimer I run BuiltWith.
So telling that you ask me not to forget MySpace's history, but Friendster is no longer mentioned - so I guess this means that we only remember one social network back ;)
Apart from that kind of peeve, I like G+ a lot and spend quite a bit of time there. I go to FB on occasion to see what my family and friends have posted but haven't really interacted much since engaging on G+.
Comparing Tumblr or Pinterest to Google+ is like comparing a motorbike to a car, both forms of transport but each serves a different purpose. Google+ haven't won anything yet and I doubt they will, the landscape is going to be marginally different come 2013.
Not sure what you are trying to say here, but I'm pretty sure someone working effortlessly in the background isn't adding a lot of value.
If anyone should be worried it should be Google, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest because many seem to forget MySpace
Wow, there is a bold prediction.
the landscape is going to be marginally different come 2013
A much less bold prediction, and somewhat at odds with what you wrote earlier.
I don't get people like yourself who so easily criticise everything others say instead of asking questions.
Don't forget that increased G+ use also should mean reduced eyeballs to the competition. If google gets its revenue from non-social, making social a monitization wasteland is a plus for them.
For the HN crowd, several influential releases/announcements are now using Google+ exclusively: Linus Torvalds, lennart poettering, Cyanogenmod, Ingo Molnar.
They still havent gotten the public/private interaction model right yet. For example, Linus went on an extended rant complaining about Google Events being used by uninvited spammers (which then got fixed when Vic Gundotra took it up)
And let's see if they can pivot the business around media. Myspace TV is a quite interesting idea and I'm waiting to see what's going to happen with it...
None of the non-techie people I know use Google+ or even mention it at all.
Hangouts are really the only reason I've ever seen a non-techie use G+, and they work really well. People seem to try Skype and then realize that there are weird rules about having to pay if you want group video chat, so people hop over to G+ and it just works.
And the news thing seems really interesting to me because it seems to highlight provocative things said by public personalities and then lets everyone with a Google account join the discussion as 'part of Google plus'. That seems like something that could get pretty sticky.
I can't say I've seen a lot of G+ pages as organic results, but they do seem to feel free to inject links to social media profiles when they're related in some way to a search result.
Why is there the need to respond to data with anecdotes? If I give a Google+ growth anecdote, does that invalidate yours?
I have no idea why Google+ is being compared to LinkedIn. They have very little overlap. Even among Facebook and Google+ the overlap is limited.
Nonetheless Google keeps iterating on the product and it seems to be paying off. The Android Google+ client is now superb, and the content richness seems to be greatly improving, particularly in the tech field. Which is important because the tech field is what generally leads the growth curve.
Why, haven't you heard? The plural of anecdote is data! :-)
Not much at all because it says nothing of intent, much less duration of stay on that page or frequency of use.
In the absence of that additional data, anecdotes can be useful to express doubt or confusion about data that seems to not pass the sniff-test. It can be as minimal as "is it just me, or does ... ?" sort of constructions or it can be more formalized to say – "This doesn't fit with my personal observations".
The mistake is thinking that anecdotes add up to data – they don't – but put enough of them together and they can be heuristically valuable – and one on its own, in the absence of other real data, is still a completely valid construct for conversational purposes or to challenge (albeit weakly) some over-cooked claim, like what I'm seeing here, with the google+ traffic data. The refutation of such an anecdotal experience with sound evidence doesn't mean the the anecdote was worthless – hardly. It was valuable because it was provocative.
Anecdote: Wrong.
incongruity: Two wrongs make a right!
I would adapt that and say that all anecdotes are wrong, but some are useful.
"Why is there the need to respond to data with anecdotes?"
I feel as though I made my case pretty well for a generalized reason, above. In this particular case, as I said:
"The key here is that the number reported is "unique visitors" – what, exactly, is this telling us? Not much at all because it says nothing of intent, much less duration of stay on that page or frequency of use.
I think there's much ado about little data. So, in the face of not all that informative of data, I think a weak bit of anecdotal pushback is wonderful if it gets conversation started.
I mean... if there's much ado about little data, why is it that MORE ado is better?
But, more fully, anecdotes aren't speculation. They're individual experience. They are not, of course, a statistically representative sample. That doesn't mean it's worthless – it's just not authoritative, but it is still some person's real experience (internet truthiness aside). The all-or nothing view of validity and knowledge is problematic – and likely not reflective of how you or anyone else actually deals with reasoning.
Beyond that if it sparked discussion that either spurred the uncovering of real data or identified the requirement of further considerations, it's still of value.
Which it didn't. We're not going to get better data until Google releases it, and Google is clearly not going to be doing so.
> But, more fully, anecdotes aren't speculation.
This claim would be okay if the anecdote was offered in a neutral environment. Here, however, it's being offered as contradictory evidence. The speculation isn't in the anecdote: it's in the purpose of offering the anecdote in the first place.
The anecdote was about the same as a TIOBE survey result coming out and responding with, "Oh, but I know a lot of Haskell programmers and don't know any Python programmers." That's wonderful for you and all, but your experience is seriously not relevant, nor does it prompt useful discussion or the discovery of useful data.
I agree that anecdotes can be useful. That's half the purpose of journalism: finding anecdotes.
I disagree that they are useful here.
Which it didn't. We're not going to get better data until Google releases it, and Google is clearly not going to be doing so.
It most certainly did spark discussion – I'd point out, somewhat ironically that you've been involved in one of them yourself – but there were a number of other replies. Some of which (mine included) addressed the data issue head-on.
> But, more fully, anecdotes aren't speculation. This claim would be okay if the anecdote was offered in a neutral environment.
There is no such thing as a neutral environment, so your premise fails from the start.
And, no, hits to a web page or unique visitor counts are not tantamount to real usage figures for a social media site. So the analogy to a TIOBE survey breaks down as well.
I disagree that they are useful here.
Well...
I said, explicitly that I was addressing the larger point of the other poster asking "Why is there the need to respond to data with anecdotes?" I started directly by pointing out the failing of "data" in this case – I find it to be an over-played trope to always say "anecdote BAD!" and yet people fall all over themselves if someone puts a shitty graph or table up, not stoping to consider what the "data" means and what possible failings it might have.
And that led me directly to the value of anecdotes in general terms – something you now say you agree with, so we'll call that point made.
Given that we agree about the general value, I think it's clear that in the face of crappy, blindly accepted data, a mere (and admittedly weak) piece of anecdotal observation does, in fact, point out that the emperor has no clothes – the data pointed to here is very, very lacking. The anecdote was weak, but sufficient for what should have been an obvious task of poking holes in questionable data.
Instead, you prove my point by digging in your heels even more because someone tossed out an anecdote.
No it doesn't.
You only have to look at Digg and Reddit to see that just because you have tech users does not mean you will see widespread growth outside that demographic.
And sites like Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram even Facebook grew because of non tech users.
LinkedIn was dominated by the tech field. Specifically the valley tech field. That was what gave it the network effect.
Maybe the bunch of google+ audience just happen to not be part of your social circle. Personally, I'd love to see some g+ usage statistics divided by demographics to confirm this hypothesis. (specially since the author explicits these numbers are from US only, not sure if that's right)
edit: G+ also seem to be extremely popular on very specific niches other than technology. Such as photograph and science. In fact, g+ developers make a big deal about their product being developed from and to photographers. You'll notice their mobile app focuses the whole experience on large beautiful photos because of it. Every day there's a different photographer-focused hashtag trending (today it's #TreeTuesday).
So yea, anecdotes, bad.
Another explanation is that it's impossible to sign up for any google product (like gmail) w/o getting herded into google plus.
There's been a lot made of FB (and other social networks) primarily being photo-sharing networks. While I doubt video will ever quite have the same impact (they're deeper but not as casually shared), it probably will grow as a social element, and Google are beautifully positioned in this regard.
So I fail to see what Google+ brings to the table other than an inbuilt video chat client which has been done so many times over the last decade.
Technology, even once widely available, can take a while to take off.
Google have been doing a TON of PR in Japan. They're doing a collaboration[0] with Japan's top J-Pop group (AKB48, with 200+ members) where they gave them all high-end Samsung phones and G+ accounts to post on. Some popular members used to post on Twitter and Ameblo, but this has extended to all members. They've also done exclusive G+ live streams of concerts, and when the group had their yearly popularity contest, Google+ had a live stream with live +1 buttons that graphed the mood over time[1].
I imagine they've also been recruiting other celebrities in Japan to drive adoption.
A comparable example is Apple's Ping. Apple doesn't tout Ping as a success because it has millions of members (who were similarly presented with a trivial sign up method in iTunes 10 - Ping registered over 1M users in the first 48 hours.) Ping, however, is rarely used by the bulk of it's members, as such it's being discontinued. Most people signed up just to see what it was like, they didn't stick around. Facebook/LinkedIn don't have this problem so much, most people already know what the services are for, so they don't need to create a profile just to see what it's like.
G+ is growing, but it's an overstatement to say that it has the same level of user engagement as facebook/LinkedIn/others.
While many continue with the faulty logic that G+ is a superior experience/platform so it should become the dominant service, need to revisit the learnings of Betamax: technical superiority does not equate to automatic or guaranteed success.
I'm on Linkedin (and Facebook) because they offer value.
I use LinkedIn for recruiting.
I use neither as "publicly facing email accounts".
At some level, any application can be described as "forms with some text inputs and some submit buttons".
Which I'm sure you used to do in email. Smaller circle, same user task.
"I use LinkedIn for recruiting."
I still use email sometimes for that. Smaller circle, same user tasks (attaching resumes, getting contact info for screenings, planning meet and greets).
Actually, it was Monster.com + email, so yeah, I guess LinkedIn replaced those.
I believe the argument was that posting a picture is analogous to emailing that picture to your friends, and commenting on that picture is the same as hitting "reply to all" on that email. It's the same behavior, presented in a different format.
I feel obligated to take issue with your characterization of Likes as voting of ... any kind. Or were you referring to something else? I'm not an FB expert.
No - you have to opt in.
> Is there a way to get rid of that?
If you want to disable G+ on your account (which will also remove your G+ profile), you can go to the "Google+" section of your Google account settings page (https://www.google.com/settings/plus). At the bottom there is a section labelled "Disable Google+".
That is definitely not the behavior I see on my alternate Gmail account which is opted out of Google+.
To check - I just created a test gmail account and opted out of Google+. The Google+ section disappeared from my account settings page, which makes sense.
I don't work on the sign-up/opt-out flow side of things, but AFAIK the policy should be basically the same everywhere.
It's confusing and maybe even counter-productive in some cases when these ninja-edits happen.
If there is a reason to change the title, let people know why. This adds to the available collective information as to what's acceptable or expected.
Example: user w submits post with good intentions and unintentionally uses an x title which is not appropriate. Title is changed by mod and user checks history. User sees title wasn't appropriate because y. Next time, user thinks about it and tries harder to be more concise/accurate. Progress.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a legal challenge to this.
What Google is doing is very much reminiscent of what got Microsoft into so much trouble. Using a monopoly in one area to extend into another.
Not when you have your entire team/company using gmail as a paid service. And when you factor in the part about the user being the product in social networking, basically you're forcing a paying customer of one product to become a revenue stream in another.
Monopolies find themselves in trouble over this all time, just like when a customer service agent from your credit card company or local energy conglomerate passes you onto a sales rep from a third party without your knowledge. It's how they scam the old, ignorant and uninformed.
tl;dr: you cannot change your bookmarks when you have no other options.
2. I have gotten rid of RSS Reader and now get all updates on G+ and blog. One less thing to worry about.
3. Too many people make too many posts on Facebook. Circle on G+ is growing on me.
4. I like everything Google.
3. Then filter those people from your feed or trim down the number of posts they make.
4. Even the privacy violations and anti-competitive behavior so serious they are under multiple investigations ?
i would love for g+ to make this more of a supported use case. right now it's a pretty terrible RSS reader, but it could be a great one. It would have been a much better plan than annoying all the google reader users with half-assed G+ integration.
It's a vague concept now - from an ISP perspective hitting a page with G+ (or T or FB) button on it when signed-in takes down a 'visit' sized payload.
When I +1 a page using Chrome Extension - is that a visit?
Same with mobile apps - what's a mobile 'visit' - an API GET?
According to jcampbell1, this is requests per domain from a traffic sample intercepted by ISPs, which means that Facebook like buttons and Google +1 buttons dominate. All we have is a 47% or so change in how many of those ISP logs contain +1 buttons.
The post was on the front-page with the original title for hours, I don't know why a mod decided that was the time to change it.
Only nobody I know, ever, ever uses Google+.
I'm guessing many visits I make to Google applications whilst logged in count as Google+ usage. In reality, I haven't used it since after the first month or two, and that is pretty much reflected by the people around me.
It should just work by default.
And if it's disabled, they should stop sending me emails asking me to sign up when they know perfectly well that they won't let me.
12.3, 7.6, 3.2
12,3, 7,6, 3,2
If you think that's confusing. It's funny to know that we often also use the dot as a multiplication sign. So "12.3,7" actually means "twelve multiplied by 3.7" in english. Btw I'm curious, does other countries also use dot for multiplication or is it only us?
We do use dots to represent multiplication, but they're not on the "ground", they're mid-height, aligned with -
For a set: { 1,2; 3,5; -12,1 }
Calculators that are otherwise internationalised force the dot convention.
Of course if I'm speaking English I would use "point".
If Google+, using a tighter identity and so-forth, happens to replace LinkedIn, that would be one way to not be in direct competition with Facebook. But also to guarantee a certain limit to growth (at least until everyone in the world has to sell themselves to potential employers and customers all the time - sadly real possibility but one that thankfully isn't appearing tomorrow).
Between visits, I think I forget it even exists.
I love Google+, but the only reason I specifically visit the site is to view my Instant Upload album.
The main consequence from Google Plus is that I see Kingsley Idenhen's face every time I do a query connected with the semantic web.
For the life of me I can't figure out how to send people messages or get into a hangout or do anything with plus...
Having said that though I still trust google more not to abuse their ad showing to the point of degrading the user experience