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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

This article goes out of its way to make Google+ look bad when it comes to numbers.

"Plus has 29 million unique monthly users on its website and 41 million on smartphones, with some users overlapping, compared with Facebook’s 128 million users on its website and 108 million on phones, according to Nielsen."

Is that supposed to be a bad thing? If you have ~1/4 to ~1/2 as many users as Facebook, are you not a very successful social network? If Plus was an independent startup people would be crowning it the next Facebook and saying that Facebook better watch its back. With all numbers in this article the author seems to say that if you don't have as many users as Facebook, you're nothing.

Plus is a Top-5 social network that also offers a convenient solution to Google's many-account problem. Sounds like it's doing just fine.

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Gonna make some guesses:

1. I have in the past counted as a unique monthly user by Googling something (restaraunt, hotel, ??) and then looking at the "Google Reviews" which would take you to a plus.google.com page. It seems Google changed the UI on this now: "Google reviews" brings up a popup thing and the hours and everything else is on a card on the right of search results.

Good on them for changing it, but do I still count as a user by having consumed content which I assume come from G+ APIs? Wouldn't be surprised.

2. I bet many of those 41 million smartphone users are just auto-uploading pictures to Google+ without really knowing what Google+ is. They just like that they can auto-upload their pictures.

Google+ isn't doing "just fine".

edit: I'd like to know the unique monthly ACTIVE users. Where "active user" is defined as having posted something on Google+ (I'd concede to defining an active user as someone who has done an action to someone else's post, e.g. Like or Comment)

>If Plus was an independent startup people would be crowning it the next Facebook and saying that Facebook better watch its back.

People have higher expectations for Google than for an unknown startup. Google has an audience of 425 million Gmail users [0] to market new services to, after all. It's unreasonable to expect every Google product to be Gmail, but that's where the bar's been set.

[0]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/gmail-now-has-425-million-u...

I agree that it should be easier for Google to get users than almost anyone else, but that doesn't mean that having X users is any less impressive because of how they were referred.

> Plus is a Top-5 social network

Actually spending time on five non-niche social networks sounds like an incredible waste of time. Either it's one of the top two, it fills a particular niche, or it doesn't matter.

> Google's many-account problem

Exactly: it's theirs, not mine. Multiple, independent accounts were a feature.

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