Google+ Is Outpacing Twitter
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I got my invite in the first wave and pretty much immediately ditched the service. I just didn't see why I'd use it. I am a light Facebook user and I don't Tweet.
Recently I decided to give G+ another try and I love what I am seeing. First of all, the site is a pleasure to use and the mobile app is by far best in class. Second, I think G+ is absolutely the best social network for those who are interested in following people outside of their friends. Celebrities on Facebook have something to sell, and on Twitter there's not enough room, but on G+ I get long, interesting posts from famous people around the world.
I only have a few friends on G+ but I am starting to check it more and more and I can say without a doubt that if it ever hits critical mass I'll be the first to drop Facebook. Google simply has the latecomer's advantage, they got to watch Facebook stumble and build around those obstacles at their own pace.
Also, Google+ sign-in is a great developer product. The deep-linking concept is a very interesting implementation of sharing for mobile apps that borrows from Android's intent system.
You might say I'm a dreamer.
I think Facebook has become to tightly woven into peoples' lives, though, that it's going to live on for quite some time. It all really depends on where the kids decide to go, methinks..
And as of late, the kids have been ditching Facebook because it's not cool anymore.
"The reasons behind Google Plus's growth -- it now can boast 359 million active users, up 33 percent from 269 million users at the end of June 2012, according to GlobalWebIndex -- are complex and tied to Google's effort to build a connecting layer across all its services, including search, YouTube, maps and other products. Log into one, and you've logged into the lot."
To take one simple example, half of Bieber's followers are fake. I'd be willing to bet that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all followers on public accounts are fake.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058
Then on top of this, I'd like to see how many Twitter users post a few Tweets and then give up. It's not hard to calculate that data just by sampling a large number of users from the API. I'd argue it's an extreme portion of the supposedly active user base.
Mostly Twitter is shallow (as in limited use and interaction) consumption platform, with relatively few highly active producers.
I signed up for Twitter around January and frankly speaking, couldn't find my way around. I've heard people speak of retweets, DMs, hash tags and variety of other terminology and didn't seem to find an explanation of what they all meant or did after I signed up. In fact, I really didn't know what to do and just logged off and didn't bother with Twitter again until a couple of months later when I thought of trying to find and meet up with other coders in my city and thought perhaps Twitter might be a way useful way to accomplish that task.
I found if I search for #[MyCity], there were a bunch of tweets with #[MyCity] so made a tweet along the lines of "Any coders in #[MyCity]? Let's meet."
8 hours later, I search #[MyCity] and my tweet wasn't even in the list. I asked on /r/Twitter and was told tweets from new accounts don't make it in the search results as to suppress spam. As a guy who doesn't know anyone on Twitter and who nobody knows on Twitter I feel like the service simply is unusable. The impression I'm left with is that Twitter is only useful for "brands". As a regular schmo who isn't a "brand", I don't see the point of using Twitter and thus my account is inactive.
Well I use both Google+ and Facebook every day and to me Google+ seems VERY active with a lot of high quality content as well.
I can't really say if it is more active than Twitter (which is also very active of course) but it certainly doesn't seem like "a ghost town" as some people try to claim.
Quick, give that CEO another bonus!
Is G+ as active as Twitter? Hell, I don't know, but it's definitely - as another commenter here just said - not a "ghost town".
However, when I was looking around for 3D printer communities, I was surprised that there was a vibrant one on G+. While one data point is not evidence, it is an example that runs counter to the current prevailing tech wisdom that nothing happens on G+.
I think while G+ may not replace FB, the interface is great, and we may find social networks have other uses for groups besides what we do on FB.
In terms of sharing popularity, printing out a webpage is 100X more popular than Google+: http://karmcity.com/post/49275229257/the-value-of-share-butt...
# It's where my Androids upload to
# It's where I get tech news - Linus, Greg KH, O'Reilly, etc. all post on G+
I tend to hope G+ doesn't become as popular as Facebook with the general public, because right now it's got a really good signal:noise ratio and I'd hate to see it drown in Farmville updates and cat photos..
They could even do it without the user's consent for people using Chrome or Android, or they could pay people to do so (it might cost them 10 billions, but it would be quite a good "company" to "acquire").
Without doing that, or having some killer feature, there's no way that they will take off.
Facebook already provides a way to download all your data, so Google just needs to write software that uses it and uploads it into Google+.
Alternatively, they can just automatically scrape the Facebook website via HTTP directly from the user's machine (using a modified Chrome, modified Android, desktop tool or Android app).
Given that that's unlawful access of a computer system (and kind of a dick move,) I don't think Google wants to go down that route.
edit: for the downvoter, I hardly support the abuse of laws like this, but that doesn't mean they won't be abused. Google writing a scraper is something that might well attract legal trouble from this and other vague computer security laws.
Naysayers would say that's an emotional response, but I would then let monopoly be defined by known indexes such as the HI and leave the conclusion to arithmetic instead of emotions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl_index
I haven't done the calculation, but we may find interesting results - and I say that while I think google + is being turned into a nice product, with useless cruft being removed little by little, and some polish added. IMHO only the legality of their tactic is troubling - the product is becoming good.
But would it have if they hadn't played dirty?
I guess it's legal if you are not getting caught.
I care about these people today, I want to follow circle XYZ, I want to share this to Mates, Nerds, Android, etc.
The Photo Albums is amazing and linked up with Instant Upload from my phone at full res when charging on a WiFi.
I really like Google+ and wish it had come out before Twitter/Facebook.
How is [1] better then [2]?!
[1] http://www.imagebanana.com/view/okt9mdpq/obamatwitter.png [2] http://www.imagebanana.com/view/ma3vuvby/obamagooglep.png
I hope i don't start a religious war now, just saying although i have a twitter account i never really got to use it...
edit: changed screenshots to english versions
Historical. Twitter started out as a web-sms gateway.
> I still don't get the value of twitter
The value is in social capital. Important people post there exclusively.
> How is [1] better then [2]?!
It isnt. But [2] came to the scene after [1] so [1] has a bigger momentum. Being slightly better does not mean everybody suddenly will switch. The perceived improvement has to be bigger than the cost of switching.
"Talk directly to semi-famous people" is one of the chief value propositions.
Suppose you are a fan of some public figure - say, an actor or a politician who has more than thousands of fan - snd you want to ask that person a question or give them a compliment.
If they're on twitter, there is a pretty good chance you could get through and have that person actually read what you have to say. If you're sufficiently witty and relevant it might even turn into a conversation. There is no other medium for which your chance of getting through is that large, and part of the reason why this is true is due to that 140-character limit.
Consider the unread messages in your email inbox. Any single email you open might turn out to be a quick topical one-liner, carefully edited to make a single point clearly and say nothing extraneous...but it's much more likely to be rambling and poorly edited. In the worst case, it could take an hour to read and understand a single email. So sorting through email (or any other non-bounded message stream) is daunting and best delegated to somebody else if you get too much of it.
The fact that tweets have to be so short forces tweeters to think carefully about what they want to say and to make their point quickly. If the message is a compliment or comment, it has to be an efficient one. If it's a question, it's an efficient question - you don't have to skim past a page of introductions and compliments and caveats to find it. And if the text is ugly or pointless or hateful, you can "block" the sender after you see a mere 140 characters of what he has to say.
So that's one use case - talking directly to people who otherwise would be protected by a circle of PR flacks. You can currently do that more effectively on twitter than most other services.
Even when talking to non-famous people, the 140-character limit imposes discipline that can make conversations more fun and efficient, but it only makes sense if some critical mass of the sort of people you like to talk to and hear from are already on the service, so it might not make sense for you yet. That's essentially a bootstrapping problem.
Google+ is honestly more of a rebranding of google than a new service. It is Google relabeling parts of popular products like Gmail and calling it Google+.