
Google+ Approaching 50 Million Users - gzomartin
http://thecompiler.org/index.php/breaking-news/company-news/95-google/150-google-approaching-50-million-users#.Tn7LGe6f-Js.hackernews
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buro9
I don't play the numbers game, because they don't matter as much as whether
those numbers happen to include my friends.

My friends were looking for somewhere, and it seems that was G+. So my circles
are vibrant and interesting, and keep me going back.

A weird thing though... circles are so useful that the site appears to be
dead.

My friends all talk to circles. Every conversation and shared thing is limited
to a small audience.

So the public view of all their profiles is: <silence>.

I've started to find this non-ideal. I'm interested in my friends for all that
they are, and I know when I've been categorised as I initially did it too. You
say something about cycling just to the cyclists... but that's an interest of
mine, and my friends like my interests.

I've moved to sharing to Extended Circles or Public all the time. It's far too
easy on G+ to end up in very small bubbles concentrated about one thing.

~~~
danmaz74
G+ is still missing some form of tags/hashtags/topics to allow posting what is
only interesting for some of your "friends", but is in no way private. I often
post to only some circles not because something is private, but because I
don't want to "spam" ti to people in other circles that probably wouldn't be
interested - but might as well be.

~~~
buro9
I agree.

The use of circles is currently a reaction to the noise on facebook and
twitter.

And whilst that is a social reaction (too much noise > too little noise), it
needs a technical solution.

I just feel that circles aren't quite it. There's some little thing missing in
finding the sweet spot.

The only things that come to mind would be to create topic circles and then
place people circles within them.

The circles placed within a topic would be arranged in rings, those closest to
the epicentre get fully sharing (with whatever notifications, etc), and those
on the periphery would get some lesser shared view (no notifications, not on
main stream wall), and any circles not included wouldn't see anything.

But that's probably way too complex to explain to 150 million users.

~~~
danmaz74
Why not just add a "topic" or tags? This would at least make it easier to
better filter the posts, using a concept that many people already know.

~~~
jaredsohn
Check out www.subjot.com (reviewed here:
[http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/11/subjot-a-twitter-
alter...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/11/subjot-a-twitter-alternative-
that-lets-you-curate-content/)) for an implementation that lets users
subscribe to friends for only certain topics. I suspect it only works with
public posts, though (but haven't used the service to know for sure).

~~~
danmaz74
Thanks for the suggestion.

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josephg
The number of users who sign up in the first couple weeks after a google
product goes live isn't predictive of the success of the product.

Buzz had 'tens of millions' [1] of users checking it out in the first week
after it launched, and wave had well over a million users try it out.

Looking at search traffic isn't quite as good as user traffic, but its still
interesting. Here's search traffic for buzz, plus and wave on the same graph:
[http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+plus%2C+google+buzz%2C...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+plus%2C+google+buzz%2C+google+wave&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

This is the search traffic graph of a healthy product (google maps):
[http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+maps&ctab=0&ge...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+maps&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

[1] [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-
users...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/millions-of-buzz-users-and-
improvements.html)

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ry0ohki
Considering there is a giant "ad" at the top of Google.com, I'm surprised it's
such a small number, relative to total number of GOOG users.

~~~
OriginalSyn
It was invite only until very recently. And when I was interested in sending
out invites it was gmail only, I don't know if that ever changed.

~~~
abraham
Google+ invites have never been restricted to Gmail users.

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petervandijck
They need to share how much time users are spending on G+. That's the number
that matters.

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jhferris3
Source? That doesnt sound like an unreasonable number, but I'm dubious of
articles like this (site I've never been to before, obvious bias, lack of
source).

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ajays
I'm not so sure if this number means anything. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to
see G+ succeed, so that FB has some serious competition. But despite nearly
2-dozen early adopter friends on G+, it feels pretty empty. Initially they
used to post updates a couple of times a day, and now it's rare to see more
than 1 update per week.

Unless Google does something drastic, I feel G+ is going to die a slow death.

~~~
OriginalSyn
Most of the people I know that use it, use it more like twitter, including
myself. I follow a lot of people I find interesting, like Wil Wheaton and Paul
Irish, they are both really active and post interesting, to me, stuff, which I
comment on and reshare and occasionally post stuff I find interesting. Then
there is the vast majority of my actual friends and family that just read the
content and maybe +1 once in a while. It's basically the 1% rule where 90% of
the people lurk, 9% of the people contribute and 1% create content.

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smoyer
It's not really a fair comparison ... Google has millions of users already and
it's completely frictionless for them to adopt yet another available service.
Facebook and Twitter had to sign up brand new users.

I'm perhaps a perfect example ... I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account
at all. But I did sign up for G+ in July and do occasionally use it.

~~~
beagle3
And yet, buzz and wave had dismal uptake, whereas G+ appears to be very
successful by any metric.

Also, how does "fair" play into anything?

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nano81
I missed the part where they promoted buzz and wave with a giant animated
arrow on the google homepage

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antics
I actually agree that it's not a fair comparison, but they did make Buzz an
opt-out component of Gmail. No, it's not an arrow on their front page, but
what you seem to be getting at is also not completely correct.

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tybris
50 million very, very quiet users.

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nano81
It will be interesting once we start seeing numbers that matter, like active
users or engagement metrics.

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phzbOx
Personally, I've used G+ the first week.. but it's been about a month(?) that
I haven't read/talk on it.

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perlpimp
G+ is slowly becoming another orkut. it is kind of twitter. it is kind of
facebook... it is ... maybe its alright place to get nifty videos, interesting
news bits. but facebook is still about your friends. That is all IMO and my
gut feeling.

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itswindy
I almost joined, by accident. If you are signed in Gmail or adsense and go
there all it takes a button to click.

Posting on it and is a different story, I'm sure.

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sijojosep17
its just a copy cat of facebook . i never thought that google simply copy
things, i expected a very innovative social networking application from
google.

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itswindy
I want to join just so I can have Scoble on my circles!! Add him, take a
screenshot, print it and then show it to kids on the neighborhood. Now that's
a status symbol

;)

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faragon
IMO, Google+ design and functionality is years light behind Twitter and
Facebook, for mentioning two examples. In my opinion they should think about
the average user needs and not just the geek-blind-view. It could be both
simple and _nice_ (now it is just ugly and barely functional).

Edit: Observation: Despite negative voting, my intention was constructive, in
order to point the weak points from my point of view. Go figure.

