Google+ is now the second largest social platform by active users | Hacker News Reader

Google+ is now the second largest social platform by active users

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66 pointsmoultano80 comments

This could be a little bit invalid because of things like Hangouts. My dev team has started using Google Hangouts as a free alternative to conference Skype. I bet I'm considered an "active" Google+ user because I have participated in a Hangout. It gets posted to my Google+ wall every time I do it.

I'm actually kind of annoyed every time I have to log onto Google+ to do something because I know they are about to add me to some press release statistic. There's something "evil" about that in my opinion.

Google's strategy is putting them in danger of becoming more hated than Facebook. At least I intentionally signed up for Facebook. Who at Google thinks they are going to beat Facebook by forcing anyone who uses Google services to be a part of Google+? It feels very Windows 95 let's integrate the browser into the kernel in the sense that I know as a user, this Google+ portion is not necessary to the product I'm trying to use, but it's being forced on me anyways. Same thing happens every time I'm on Youtube now. No, I don't want my Google+ page updated when I watch a video on Youtube, nor do I want to use my "true identity" when browsing Youtube, nor do I want to explain why I don't want to do that in a way that fits into Google's 4 prefabbed reasons that don't seem to include, "I'd just like to be anonymous, now get off my back about it."

The rate their going, I wouldn't be surprised if by next year something will be posted to Google+ when I read my Gmail and I'll be an "Active User".

What ever happened to making your product better so that people want to use it instead of "tricking" them into being a part of it?

Why wouldn't using hangouts count as using Google+?

Its a feature of Google plus. You're using it to interact with your peers.

Just because the feature set is not narrowly defined to Facebook standards does not make it less of a social network.

The methodology of "active" users is always more than a bit suspect, but a) the source for this post (by some random person on g+?) isn't even from google and b) this:

> I'm actually kind of annoyed every time I have to log onto Google+ to do something because I know they are about to add me to some press release statistic. There's something "evil" about that in my opinion.

is a bit of an overreaction. You use hangouts and you dislike (if) that gets counted as an active user? Who on earth cares that much about self-promoting press releases?

I agree about the overreaction but if you dial it back a bit there is a valid underlying point. If he does nothing social on Google+ then he isn't really contributing anything to it's growth other than a single digit in some statistics.

I'd like to see some better metrics although I can see the practical difficulties in obtaining them.

How is talking with other people "nothing social"? Did you mean "nothing public to the World"?

Not exactly but I agree I'm not being terribly precise. I'm floundering in trying to clarify to myself what the difference is but no-one usually describes email as 'social media' even when you use the cc field.

Remember that the little "You hung out with..." thing is not shared with anyone but the people in the Hangout. So although you're using Google+, nobody else needs to know. (Nor will they know unless you explicitly share something with them.)

Also, this was not a Google press release, this was just some random guy doing some data analysis. I doubt he has any idea that you use Google+ except that you publicly posted about it here.

> This could be a little bit invalid because of things like Hangouts... I bet I'm considered an "active" Google+ user because I have participated in a Hangout.

Sorry to break it to you like this, but you are an active user of G+. You are actively using a major feature of the product, namely Hangouts. You may not be using it in the way that Google intended it (business vs. personal use), but you are indeed using it.

Really? So you don't like it when companies release statements about the number of active users on their site? I think you would be hard pressed to find a publicly traded company that doesn't report their number of active users--in press releases, too, no less.

I think what you're trying to say is that you feel that Google+ Hangouts are not a true part of Google+? Because this feature does not specifically need to belong to Google+? (Correct me if I have misjudged your opinion.) Well, sure, it doesn't have to, but Google wants it there, and it makes sense from a social perspective.

You may be using a subset of Google+ features, but that still makes you a user--just like if you only used Skype or Facebook for the video chat feature, you would still be a user.

Would you find normal to be counted as an active user of Microsoft's social network just for using Skype (supposing you could use the same account)?

If Skype was part of a Microsoft social network, yes. Would you say you are inactive on Facebook if you use Facebook chat with colleagues? Facebook video conferencing?

If it was really the only thing I used, then yes, I would not count myself as an active user of a social network. It is OK to say google+ has N number of active users, what irks people is when they say it is the largest or second largest social network using that count

Indeed. It's not actually accurate to count Google+ as a separate product. They should be saying that Google has N number of active users.

There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions.

Apple gives you a single signon for their App Store, iCloud, and many of their other services. It unifies your interaction with Apple related HW and services to a single identity. Does it anger you that Apple forces you to sign into your AppStore account to use iCloud when they could be separate? Facebook is used by many sites as a signon credential (which is what I mostly use it for).

For the most part, all of this talk about Google "forcing" you to use G+ to access their other services is really about promoting a single signon, centralized account profile, instead of having different accounts on different properties. This yields a consistent user interface, and centralized location for you to view what information Google knows about you for all their services, and how to delete or export it. You can choose to not "sign in" on some of the properties, for example, legacy YouTube logins still work, but honestly, is it really better for the user if you had a different account for YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Drive, etc and had to log into all of them separately? For example, having Google Wallet linked to your profile lets you buy something on YouTube, in Google Play, or elsewhere, without fumbling with a credit card.

Unlike some of Facebook's services/apps, Google does not automatically share your activity on some news feed every time you do something on their sites, you have to specifically choose to share it. Indeed, it appears G+ doesn't want to pollute the feed with lots of autopublished stuff which interferes with S/N search quality, which is one reason theorized as to why no "write" API exists yet.

G+ is plus.google.com, if you are on other properties signed in, then the biggest benefit is having the Share button be able to pull your contacts, combined with a single place to manage your settings for everything.

In many cases you have a choice. You can use Chrome without signin. You have incognito windows. YouTube doesn't require signin unless the video is NSFW, etc.

I for one, appreciate the "G+ as a common layer across Google Websites" for the purposes of unified profile/single-signon. The plus.google.com newsfeed service is just one addition service you can either choose to use or not. It's best not to think of G+ as a social network + activity stream like Facebook.

There is a lot of hyperbole. And also a lot of ignorance as in your post.

Today on Youtube. I am signed in and wanted to bookmark a video I just saw. I can't do that without them creating a PUBLIC Google Plus account with my FULL NAME even though I am already logged in.

Care to explain that one ?

Ditto for me, only it was to view a public post on Google Plus. Nope.

That is because you are signed into YouTube using your Google account and not a YouTube account. If you create a YouTube account that you sign into using your Google account you would be prompted to update to Google+ but would not be required to.

i don't get your point: why is that a bad thing?

> There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions.

Not really. Just the other day I was asked for the second time in two months by YouTube if I wanted to use my real name. I almost did accept it, by mistake, after pressing 2 or 3 buttons that had "Yes, I do want to use my real name" pre-highlighted by default.

Don't get me wrong, I think Google builds a lot of other great (that's an understatement) products, YouTube being just one of them. But in the case of G+ they should have declared it "mission accomplished" and move on to other more interesting stuff. And yes, outside of Silicon Valley and a couple of other tech-related areas G+ is a ghost-town.

you don't have to sign in with your App Store account into iCloud. You can use different accounts to sign into each apple service which needs one on the same device ( or computer) I.e for App Store , iCloud , FaceTime , messages.

But your parent comment is an active user of g+ by using hangouts - it is one of its main features. And he definitely should be counted as one.

> Unlike some of Facebook's services/apps, Google does not automatically share your activity on some news feed every time you do something on their sites

This is not really correct. In fact Facebook publishes only the activities "share" and "like". But not only that, Facebook gives me full control over who will see this.

G+ is really dubious in this respect. Sometimes when I google search I see "xyx also goes to this page". Damn, so now I need to use Incognito every time I search for Christmas presents? Or what happens if I search for a different employer, will my work colleagues see that?

Since one or two years Youtube is bugging me to be less pseudonymous. Yesterday they asked this weird question, at least this general bugging stopped.

Sorry Google, if this is really only about Single-Sign-On, then keep a more clear separation of your services. Google+ sounds like a pretty heavy-weight Single-Sign-On solution, right?

If this is your competition, you will lose your customers to competitors like Mozilla.

I find it hard to believe you're seeing any kind of "xyz also visits this page" message. Are you perhaps confusing it with "xyz explicitly chose to endorse this page with a +1"?

Maybe, probably in combination with a feature that sometimes tells me that I searched some term some time ago and how often I visited a hyperlink. What disturbs me: these features are hardly explained anywhere, making this an incubator for FUD. (I can delete my browser history - how do I delete this?)

http://history.google.com . You can delete everything, delete just specific entries, or turn it off completely.

Thanks a lot

A gmail-using friend sent me an email. He attached an image. I would have expected to just, you know, see the image in the email I received.

Instead, all there was was a link which google helpfully put in place of the image itself in my friend's email. That link was to an image that my friend was "sharing". When I clicked on the link, I had to log in to my G+ account (which I virtually never use), and then get "permission" to view the document (image).

Am I counted as an active user? Given Google's incentives, I'm guessing yes.

Was the simple act of attaching an image hijacked for those same incentives? I'm guessing yes.

It sounds like your friend put a link to an image (hosted on G+) in their email.

Source: I just emailed an image from one Gmail account to the other and what you stated didn't happen.

How is that different than getting an email from Facebook that some friend has shared a photo with you? You would have to login to Facebook to view that photo. (and would therefore be counted as an active Facebook user)

Anyways, your friend never attached an image, he just send you a link. It wasn't Google that replaced that image with a link, it's your friend that chose to share that image using Google's services instead of manually attaching it to every email.

And yes, I am pretty sure that you are counted as an active user after accessing Google+ while beeing logged in with a Google+ account.

Possible he sent me a link, but we discussed it, and he said he followed the same steps as he usually did when he'd attached images before. I didn't watch him.

> There's really a lot of hyperbole in these discussions.

I'm starting to see these discussions as an example of fundamentalism. A lot of people talk as if they're being threatened by this; it's reminiscent of listening to people talk about how marriage is under siege. I'd love to see a language analysis comparing the two, actually, for a more objective perspective.

I mean... how much of this debate is driven by an unconscious thought along these lines: "I still use Facebook, even though everyone agrees it's evil. I feel bad about that, but I don't want to leave my friends there. We could move to G+ or something, but it'd be hard to get everyone to go."

And how is that different from the way Facebook counts its users? If anything I find using Hangouts a lot more "engaging with Google+" than just clicking the Like button.

In other words, every time you press the “Like” button on NFL.com, for example, you’re an “active user” of Facebook. Perhaps you share a Twitter message on your Facebook account? That would make you an active Facebook user, too. Have you ever shared music on Spotify with a friend? You’re an active Facebook user. If you’ve logged into Huffington Post using your Facebook account and left a comment on the site — and your comment was automatically shared on Facebook — you, too, are an “active user” even though you’ve never actually spent any time on facebook.com.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/those-millions-on-fac...

Using a Hangout implies actively using Google+. Just because you don't you use all of its features doesn't mean you aren't using it.

> It feels very Windows 95 let's integrate the browser into the kernel

It is exactly what Google is doing. Embrace and extend.

I am not sure if it new or not but Google+ posts are appearing a lot more in the knowledge graph part of the search results. But of course in typical Google+ fashion it is almost always some completely irrelevant, helpful and childish meme image.

It feels very Windows 95 let's integrate the browser in the kernel

Pedantic notice: what you describe actually happened with Win98/2000, not 95.

"i use and like hangouts but i am mad about google+" --> LOL

When G+ initially came out, everybody here was excited to have an alternative to Facebook. Posts about their increasing user numbers were celebrated and everybody was excited.

Then it became clear that Google, like Facebook was going to force people to use real names and since then, everybody likes to hate on G+. Whatever they do is said to be even more evil and whenever they or others publish user numbers, everybody is explaining how the data must be wrong and how G+ is a ghost town and a failure.

Can't we just be honest here? Yes. The real name policy sucks. But does this mean the whole G+ is a failure and every evidence to the contrary must be wrong? Just because you dislike it doesn't mean everybody does.

That's actually the only reason i dont care about google+ , the real name policy doesnt only suck its freaking dangerous!!!! cause if facebook goes after your account, so what, you lose some pictures and posts? but you can make a new one and find your friends fast! its bothersome, when google goes after your account, you lose your mail, your documents, your adwords, your adsense, your android.... its a web apocalipse, and for what? for not using your real name? wtf is that! so i dont think avoiding google+ is a question of dislike, more like a preemptive attempt to keep your valuable data safe.

Please don't spread misinformation. If Google has a problem with your name, they will at most prevent you from using Google+ until you fix it. The other Google products you use will be unaffected.

https://plus.google.com/116098411511850876544/posts/4t8sFLLK...

If it ever were the case that Google would lock you out entirely, that is no longer the policy (nor has it been for a long time). A lot of the early reports that people were getting locked out of Google were centered around one person, who claimed to have been locked out from Google over his name, but it turned out the lockout was because he'd uploaded questionable images to his account (I can't find a link at the moment, but here is Matt Cutts alluding to it: https://plus.sandbox.google.com/u/1/+MattCutts/posts/NNJduMF...).

The policy, for the record, is here (see the bottom of the page): http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

:\ you are joking right! did you read the policy? i'll quote "If your profile is suspended, you will not be able to make full use of Google services that require an active profile such as Google+, Reader and Picasa. This will not prevent you from using other Google services, like Gmail. Your profile can be restored by editing your name and submitting an appeal that will be reviewed by our team, as directed by on-screen instructions."

soooo nothing has changed! if they dont like your name or if you dont have a good enough proof bye bye!!! im not spreading misinformation, my coment is still pretty much valid, there is still to this day a chance that by signing up to Google+ that they will suspend your account!

According to the definition from the source document, visiting this link is probably sufficient for you to be counted as a Google+ user.

Is there any measurement of social networks that doesn't count people viewing a web page on the social network as a user?

A social network that does nothing but serves web pages isn't a "social network", it is a "web server"

A social network that does nothing but allow the user make use of web applications is not a "social network", it is often called an "application server", or perhaps still "web server".

A social network as originally defined, was a particular kind of web application where one could describe real-life relationships to a machine which would then attempt to assist the user in maintaining those relationships, for example by sharing drunk shots or funny cat videos.

Google+, in almost all its integrations with other Google products, does not count as a "social network" in the traditional sense -- rendering a "G+" button in an endless series of places where it might accidentally be clicked does not constitute helping the user maintain real world relationships. Forcing users of older web applications to create a Google+ account in order to remain a user of that older web application does not constitute helping the user maintain real world relationships. Integrating arbitrary applications tightly with Google+ does not unconditionally constitute helping the user maintain real world relationships.

In every conceivable way Google+ is a failure as a social network: almost everyone uses Facebook for what Google+ tries and fails to achieve, these "stats" only serve to highlight this each time they appear in the news. In the meantime, it has turned into some kind of mediocre blogging platform, except it doesn't support RSS (because that would encourage people to never visit the site – undistorting the stats against Google's favour).

To count me as a "social network user" I would first expect said network to have helped me maintain real life relationships somehow – Facebook does this, and not by pilfering my Gmail address book, not by tricking me into clicking a share link while I watch a lolcat on YouTube, not by crippling my favourite applications (Reader), and least of all not by rendering blog posts.

Google's only successful social applications to date (IMHO) have been Gmail (including Talk) and Reader, and they already managed to kill one of these in their panic to beat Facebook.

I'm not sure where GWI gets their information, but the number 343m seems a good match to G+'s "total actives", as the last result we shared publicly was 235m but that was almost 2 months ago. The number of G+ accounts was already much bigger due to migration, but the number of "stream actives" (people who actually used plus.google.com, or the mobile clients, in the last 30 days) was lower at 135m (again, on Dec 6). Current numbers are bigger, the stream actives may or may not already be in the ballpark of GWI's claim, but AFAIK we didn't yet share new numbers after Dec 6. Rest assured though that when we officially share "stream active" numbers, it's real stuff no tricks.

GWI's comparison is difficult because not all social networks disclose the number of strictly active users -- how many people recently checked their stream/profile/whatever. Most notably, Facebook only publishes the biggest stat of total number of open accounts.

s/profile/timeline

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Here is the blog post to the "report": http://globalwebindex.net/thinking/social-platforms-gwi-8-up...

According to the article: “Active Usage” (defined as “Used or contributed to in the past month”).

Now according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail): As of June 2012, it (Gmail) is the most widely used web-based email provider with over 425 million active users worldwide.

Do you really believe that 80% of Gmail users are "active" Google+ users?

I'd love to see some statistics relating to time spent on the site, or number of page views. I suspect that G+ would be orders of magnitudes lower than Facebook

> I suspect that G+ would be orders of magnitudes lower than Facebook

Ignoring Facebook here, this chart should give them food for thought: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en#q=instagram%2C%2...

Explains the recent move to trick all the YouTube users into signing up for Google+.

I mean seriously why does creating a private video playlist require a public Google+ page.

I stopped using Youtube's customization features years ago.

I don't want everybody to know what kind of music I listen to and what my interests are like. Google does not seem to get that. In fact I might stop using Youtube completely soon, except for watching linked Videos. As we all know a login is necessary to watch Videos that are not for children.

In fact Google search has become weird since they more or less half-publicly track which sites I'm visiting from Google. Seriously, this has to stop.

It just doesn't matter how many stats they release. The stat just doesn't "feel" true. I have never read a report from anyone who has signed into Google Plus, who has reported anyone but Google employees or their friends using the service.

The only thing bragging about statistics from the service does is make people trust Google less. It does not further engender confidence in Google Plus.

I agree with those that point out that Google Plus is counting "active" users in fallacious method. Common sense of millions of users has to square with the stats companies are releasing. Facebook's? They make sense. Google's? They just don't.

Your comment doesn't "feel" true to me. But I'm signed into Google Plus on a daily basis and while it turned out that one of my coworkers is married to a Googler, she's the only Googler I interact with on a semi-regular basis. And I pretty much met her through G+; it was months later that we actually met in real life.

Is there a correlation to Google asking me yesterday to merge my Youtube account with my Google account?

Google+ posts are rated unsurprisingly much higher in Google results than Facebook posts.

Are Facebook posts even indexed? I don't recall ever seeing one. I just tried a few searches and can't find anything.

Is there even such a thing as a 'personal Facebook post that's public'? As you can tell I'm not a regular user...

Yes there is, it's just not included in search engines.

Any idea why? Are they linkable? Can you provide an example url?

I don't have a Facebook account, but you can search Twitter and find a lot of them. I suspect you would need to be logged in, even if they are public.

Facebook's robots.txt looks pretty restrictive:

http://facebook.com/robots.txt

Their sitemap doesn't even load for me.

(I don't use Facebook so I don't know how much this covers, but it's an interesting read compared to http://plus.google.com/robots.txt.)

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /

Yep, pretty much everything.

I don't think Google can even index most Facebook posts.

One of my SEO savvy friends was recently telling me that being reshared by high-authority profiles on Google+ is currently one of the best ways to get a massive boost in your google rankings.

Google+ is the most thriving dead platform of the web. People keep on calling it an empty playground and it keeps on growing. Man are people going to turncoat on this shit if it finally makes it HUGE some day.

Google can try and force Google+ down the throats of every unsuspecting Gmail or YouTube user. But you know what it isn't an authentic sign up. It is "tricking the user".

And it may work in the short term but it sure as hell won't work in the long term.

Yeah, I can see that. I don't know about you though, but I've had the feeling that people really are engaging more on Google+ than they were before. And it's a different demographic too, one that I like better. More technical people and more refined discussions. Just my opinion though, nothing about Facebook per se.

Google+ encourages Blog-style postings. (I don't know how they do it, but it seems natural -- more natural than on FB.) After all Google+ is pretty cool for people who don't want a private life, unfortunately I don't belong to this group.

They do it by not bringing up the word "friend" everywhere, actually. Compare Wordpress versus Livejournal; the latter is practically a synonym for emo angst, even though there are strong intellectual posts on the site, but the former doesn't have such a connotation. The problem with having a network with your friends is that there's a natural echo chamber that inhibits really high quality discussion. It's not impossible, but it's a lot harder.

By touting circles as a way to follow completely random people, smart people who want smart posts will naturally gravitate towards other such people and it causes a network effect: at minimum, lots of sharing; at maximum, heavy duty responses.

My favorite circled person in my 2000-odd list is some random academic in Idaho who I saw make a comment one day and decided to add. https://plus.google.com/112482032780181267192/posts

How long is a long term? Five years? Ten years?

is it really that unreasonable for google to integrate their products to create a better use experience for their users?

if you don't like that gtfo b/c there are other options for you to survive without google (yahoo, facebook and microsoft)

i still remember how people dismissed facebook b/c "everyone was on myspace" or that an average person would never use twitter.

google+ is bound to grow b/c people love google products and the new google is trying to integrate these products for a better end user experience. as a heavy google user i can easily see that.

Wheres the MSN Live/Skype/Xbox network?

What is considered an active user?

I want to know this too. I don't know of any of my facebook friends that actively use Google+.

If you follow the links to the source Globalwebindex doc, they defined it as "Used or contributed to in the past month".

So Google is counting YouTube users who save videos to their playlist as "active users".

Absolutely disgraceful. I feel sorry for advertisers that are going to be tricked by this.

Read my other reply.

And we care why?

This entire discussion here reminds me back when GMail touted 30 million users. "It's still a beta", "They'll never get as much users as hotmail or Yahoo! Mail!", "People just signed up to try it!", etc.

Now they're the most used webmail and people aren't disputing it anymore.

Same when they bought YouTube: "Google is going bankrupt, they bought a money drain, game over Google".

On my statistically insignificant level, I do see my contacts (the ones who are both on FB and on G+) post more interesting stuff on G+ and less and less things on FB. The one thing people do still post are vacation brags "Been there, done that, 30 deg Celsius here, must suck to be at home for you guys" and the classic "I hate noodles, now I have diarrhea, life is a bitch" followed by "Like"s and "Be strong mate, you'll be ok soon".

That and people who hardly post anymore because of FB security concerns who then post stuff explaining how to harden FB security settings ; )

People liked Gmail, though. It was a product everyone loved, a major upgrade for webmail. Google+, on the other hand, has some cool features but is also a cudgel that Google is beating us over the head with if we want to post YouTube comments, Google Local reviews or Play Store app reviews, none of which ought to require using a real name. As Gmail users we're constantly nagged to "upgrade" to Plus. These are legitimate reasons to dislike G+; it's not just jealousy.

i think you are missing the point. using real names decreases spam as was a known problem with app reviews/ratings on play store.

i do agree that google+ would be even more awesome if they had post or reply as "anonymous" feature like in quora.

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