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> 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.

> 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.

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'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.

> 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."

> 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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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

> 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.