Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomkarlo | Hacker News Reader

There's an assumption here that doing this would result in a material number of users for Google+. But I'm not sure it would: it's reasonably safe to assume that everyone using Google Reader knows about G+, and is either using it already or has decided to not use it. At best, what's proposed would convert some percentage of that latter group (maybe) over to using G+. It might be a couple million users if everything plays out well. It's probably less.

That sounds like a lot, but at the scale G+ and FB are competing, a few million (possible) users isn't worth allocating dev resources for. They're looking for things that move tens, or hundreds of millions of users. Some opportunities are just too small to pursue.

View on HN

My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users.

Even if only 50% of those migrated over to Google+, if they had found a way to cleanly incorporate RSS feeds into their interface, that's probably a non-trivial amount of users, especially if they are checking multiple times a day, and sharing news/information from their RSS out to readers.

It's not just about users, it's also about activity..

6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of millions of users. And 50% is a wildly optimistic percentage for how additional G+ users you'd create.

Let's say they have 12M monthly active users; a large percentage of those are probably already G+ users (let's call it 50%.) A large percentage of the remainder have deliberately decided they don't want to use G+, so you'd be doing pretty damn well to convert 10-20% of them over.

So that's only 600K-1.2M MAU in a "best case" outcome. You're just not going to be able to sell that as being worth allocating a half-dozen engineers to pursue building a new product. It's not even close.

>6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of millions of users.

In the use case of a type of site where cascading network effects are of paramount importance, 6M engaged users is huge.

Yeah, but you're assuming they'd be engaged. If they don't like G+ and they're just using it as a news reader, that's pretty much the opposite of engaged, from a social network perspective.

The last 6 million maybe nothing, but the first 6 million is huge. So is the 2nd and 3rd.

> My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users.

My understanding is that the better figures are closer to twice that: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns#fn5 (and that Reader users were very active).

You underestimate engagement. I guess most of these users already has a Google + profile, but are not engaged.

By integrating both services (specially the old social features from reader) they could make Google + a much more active community, overnight.

Instead, they decided to send their users to other venues. This is just dumb.

It would be like adding Flickr (something like 30M) to Facebook (1B) -- the difference just wouldn't be noticeable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com