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Comment by atirip | Hacker News Reader

This is like a reading news from Mars. Lots of martians doing something, somewhere. Interesting, but I really do not know any martian.

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Really? You don't know anyone using G+? If so, you are missing out. The +1 feature alone is worth the non-price of pre-admission.

Of course, I feel a similar way about Facebook. I know a lot of people use Facebook avidly, but I almost never do. Every time I log onto that site I regret it. At least on G+ I can aggressively tune out the boneheads with some hope of success and without incurring a ton of social kickback.

Yes, honestly really. I use FB to keep in touch with my real friends I don't see very often, or at all. Most of my friends are not geeks and they will never-ever join twitter or g+. Also I do not share much and I do not press Like buttons. Ever. Apps are disabled, explicitly. I do not seek popularity. My Friend Policy is - I must have meet you outside work and voluntarily talked with you about something not realated to work. Maybe I'm the last dinosaur.

> Most of my friends are not geeks and they will never-ever join twitter or g+.

And here you overplay your hand. You have no idea what Twitter's main userbase is.

I know, but for some reason, twitter never got off here.

The +1 is a feature?

I haven't seen any real value demonstrated from it, except as a marketing gimmick my Google. The number of reported "+1's" means absolutely nothing to me.

My friends +1 things and they get elevated on my search results. Since my friends tend to like things I too would be interested in (and they're also people I trust), this weighting is awesome and helps me all over the place.

That's the sales pitch of +1, but I see no value, and purposefully avoid it. That's just me. And I'd much rather have a "-1" button.

I see +1 more as a "please store this piece of marketing info to my personal data portfolio"; pretty ingenious of Google, but I'm not falling for it.

I'm not sure why you'd view it this way, at least while still engaging in ANY online activity. The reality of the modern web is that everyone is tracking everything you do with their assets all the time. Even people you might not expect are keeping server logs that, with sufficient massaging, could reveal a lot of data. And Google hardly needs you to TELL them this data. They can determine your existence and search habits and friends simply by examining secondary sources.

It's inevitable. Get over it. Or rather, get empowered by it.

Google's play here is that they have this data for when you click through–and it's been helping them for years–but now they're exposing it to you. So you get the benefits of big data analysis in a context you can understand. Instead of being some sort of back-alley data collection initiative, +1 makes the whole process very much an up-front-and-transparent thing, complete with data export. \

I'm not sure how much more consumer-friendly and empowering a feature can be. Society wants the benefits of big data analysis and so companies have to find ways to make it valuable, transparent, and straightforward. How is this relationship any different from your relationship with Mint.com or Simple?

> but I see no value, and purposefully avoid it.

Allow me to give you concrete cases. I was looking for a good raspberry pi breakout board so I can use the GPIO without concern that a bad soldering job would lead to a dead board. I type this in and I see those little people and +1 notifications for some products and blog posts and not others. I also see promoted images from a friend who just installed one.

I have a fairly good idea about the authenticity and trustworthiness of these people, and so the search results have helpfully incorporated this data and helped shape my purchasing process.

Now, I have made it a point to cultivate relationships with people in this space that are also G+ users, so it isn't "free", but it pays off pretty handsomely in cases like this.

Is that not a clear enough value proposition?

I think his point is that for some (can't speak for all) bubbling is not wanted at all. To give you an example (this is just me): I hate bubbling, so I use duckduckgo when I can. If I need to find a pair of skies, I do thorough searches, look at reviews or ask friends -- I don't rely on Google "sort of" knowing what my friends know. They may sell it as a social feature, but is it in fact no the opposite?

Hi, nice to meet you.

In all seriousness, I think Google+ is a massive force. If you play the SEO game at all (and let's face it, most web companies do at least a little bit), then you have to pay attention to Google+ because it's showing up on search results. That makes those web companies more invested in getting their users to use Google+ and encourages adoption. Circular, strategic, very interesting to watch.

That's the whole game, isn't it? Leverage your dominant market position in one area to win in another. These days, if you are a business, you have to play Google's game. And its not just web businesses. Its any business that markets to consumers. Leveraging their dominant position in search creates massive leverage to move people to G+.

If I was a betting man, I would say most of the usage is not in the USA and Europe. Probably primarily in India, Asia, and South America where Google products tend to get a ton of usage. That's really nothing to be ashamed of, but it really gives the impression that no one uses G+ when the tech press is primarily located in an area which doesn't see a ton of G+ usage.

What do you mean? Like country by country, or in aggregate US vs non-US? Because even for Facebook, most of the usage would be non-US, obviously, since they have 1 billion users and there aren't that many people in US.

But on country by country basis, Google+ gets the most users from US by far:

http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2012/02/22/google-dem...

I wonder how they are pushing the millions of Orkut users into it. those were huge in brazil/india for a while.

I know three separate communities of varying technical prowess who have ended up on Google+ and seem to be functioning quite happily (Members of the open data/open governance community, an extended science fiction community featuring some rather well known members such as the authors of the Expanse and SMBC, and folks like Yehuda Katz).

Every last one of these people is based in the USA.

Would you have made a similar comment if these numbers were for some other site, say Baidu or Rakuten?

The most obvious difference is that I know who are the users of these sites.

Google+ might be popular in a geographic part of the world, or among a certain community I'm not part of, just like Baidu is in China, Rakuten is in Japan, Vkontakte is in Russia, Orkut in brazil, etc.

I just have no idea, and it seems I'm not the only one, what this demographic they have conquered is.

I have a feeling most people here would be quite interested to hear news about martians.

Don't worry 99,999,999 of the users are Scobilizer, the other is Vic Gundotra checking the user stats.

Is that one of the services that will take your inane post made on 1 social platform and the mindlessly propagate it to all of the others that you have? If so, that's a point I wanted to bring up: does "active" mean, logs in and does stuff, or does "active" simply mean they're syndicating content to it?

No, Scobleizer is a name for Robert Scoble, a well known Google+ power user.

Unlike FB or Twitter, it's relatively difficult to post content to Google+. They only recently opened up APIs to some third-party social media management tools like Hootsuite, and they're still not just open to anyone.

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