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Comment by rmthompson | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to be honest, until TechCrunch's article, I had thought that Google+ was already done. I haven't heard a single compelling reason to use it outside hangouts, but hangouts is not Google+. So as much as I hate to agree with TechCrunch, they see the writing on the wall.

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I've been trying to get my friend's to use Google+ since we all spend so much time in Hangouts and Gmail (where you can see the G+ notifications). Hangouts is probably the best part of the "G+ revolution", and they really dropped the ball on the integration with G+ (I can't have an event attached to a hangout, etc.) as well as developer relations for building cool apps with Hangouts Chat (not just video). I hope that this means a more focused and deliberate shift to focusing on Hangouts. Hangouts video is great and chat is good, but could be so much better.

300 million monthly active users... what a dead product.

That number is inflated by adding YouTube users, which was a kind of social network with it's own kind of audience (notoriously trollish in some ways) before the shotgun wedding to G+.

My follower growth has slowed. The first product page I put on Google+ (a book about Android) got many followers quickly. Same with my personal page. The second time I put up a product page for a book, the response was much attenuated, and my follower growth has been slow and low quality. It wasn't great quality on Facebook either, but it was much faster. Maybe I need to see how well product pages would do on LinkedIn.

I started when G+ launched. 5500+ circlings, 2500+ to my first product page. Now I'm lucky if I get a single comment or +1. Meanwhile, I have 81 friends on Facebook and 10 followers, and it's a rare post that doesn't get comments and likes.

"That number is inflated by adding YouTube users"

They specifically bifurcate the two types of users. There's ~500 million if you count the G+ interactions through youtube and other apps.

Google is a master of spin analytics.

Why dont they say how many unique users create a daily post not generated from a app?

We are not talking about adding a youtube comment, uploading a photo with picasa or using the google play store. We are talking about actually using the thing.

I'm honestly not sure what to think. I post pictures that got a lot of great feedback on other places to Google+. Google+ reports that these pictures get hundreds of views, but almost no one +1s, shares, or comments.

I'm curious as to the definitions. Before I turned it off, I would see little notifications. I'd click them, and delete, or block someone. Is that active?

Of things that link to it, or actual users of plus.google.com or the app equivalent?

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