

Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million  users - acak
http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q3_google_earnings.html

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deltaqueue
Just a datapoint, but out of all the invitations I sent out when G+ first
launched (100-150, I don't recall), 40 or 50 friends signed up. ~3 of them
still use it at least once a week.

From my observations, G+ still seems to consist primarily of three major user
groups:

    
    
      1. Tech celebrities
      2. Technologists in general
      3. Non-US users
    

Facebook's feature set is killer, but at some point, I really would like to
use some social software that doesn't silently launch a blinking GPS signal
when I'm reading my news feed (I know, I can disable it, but still...).

~~~
manojlds
You forgot professional photographers...

~~~
robotchampion
Yup and also remember that Facebook beat MySpace because of the techie users.
It's not the masses that determine success its the influencers.

~~~
gms
Were you around when Facebook came out? Its early users were not tech types.

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dazbradbury
Scanning through the comments here, in the media, and lots of tech blogs,
google+ is taking a bit of a battering. Everyone seems to be hating on it.

Sure, it's quite likely it will never "beat" facebook, but what happened to:
<http://xkcd.com/918/>

I'm still very happy there is an alternative. I don't care if people think two
social networks is one too many. Competition is good.

Facebook = { All the people I know (pretty much) }

Google+ = { All the people I care about what they have to say }

I think google+ will always have a place, regardless of whether it crushes
fbook in terms of active users or not.

~~~
watty
I agree, I rarely go on facebook anymore. Picasa + Google+ blows facebook out
of the water... except it lacks users :)

~~~
paganel
A social network that is great but which lacks users... it reminds me of Radio
Yerevan jokes :) (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Yerevan>)

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gms
How do they define 'user', for Google+? Facebook's metric is 'active users'
which I believe are people who have visited the site during the past 30 days.

If Google+'s definition of 'user' is simply someone who has registered for a
Google+ profile, then they are overcounting enormously.

My feeling is that they are indeed disingenuously overcounting, in the same
way they do with Android, where they talk about the number of 'activations'
rather than device sales.

~~~
lukesandberg
In the case of android, Google doesn't even have relationships with every
carrier that sells android phones so 'activations' are the only metric that
would actually cover everything.

why do you think that they are not using a 30-day active definition of user?

~~~
gms
Because I know a lot of people who use Facebook, and next to none of those use
Google+ (even though many registered in the beginning). This is the same for
many people I know. So I'm taking a guess.

As far as I can tell the only people using Google+ are tech people.

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dcurtis
"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term
marketable securities were $42.6 billion."

During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an
impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do
with all that money.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Buy patents apparently :-) More seriously, I asked once about this when they
were removing bottled water from the local mini-kitchens and dropping over 1
billion dollars a quarter into the bank. My question was "Gee, can't you spare
a couple of million this quarter to keep the bottled water restocked?" and
obviously the answer was that they could not.

But from a corporate/strategic point of view having a lot of cash on hand
makes executives more aggressive and that can be a good thing for the company.
Just like employee's that are too afraid to lose their job to say what they
really need to say, executives who are too afraid that their next decision
could doom the company won't take those risks.

Like anything there is a balance.

~~~
haberdasher
Removing bottled water is not a financial decision, but an environmental one.
Every new employee is given a water bottle they can fill with water an
infinite number of times.

If they took away bottled water, I'm sure they replaced them with fruit juice,
organic teas and all sorts of ambrosia.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I should have noted that the bottled water 'discussion' at Google was long and
heated and what Googler's would call a multi-centa-thread [1]. There were
folks who shared the position stated above that it was environmentally
'better' to not have bottled water in the mini-kitchens. And there were folks
of a more empiricist frame of mind who analyzed data and came to an
alternative conclusions. Understand the company is very data driven.

Watching it unfold was educational on so many levels.

[1] A 'Centa-thread' being an email discussion that gets to 100 replies where
Gmail would fork it and start new conversation.

~~~
quattrofan
Interesting, since I've never got to a 100 reply email I've not seen this.

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zmmmmm
An interesting meta data point here is that out of the short few sentences
they chose to quote from larry page, more than 50% of it was about Google+.
Even though it generates no revenue and has a tiny user base compared to the
rest of Google's products.

Which is to say, whatever you think about Google+ it is undeniable that they
see it as a huge strategic priority.

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aprescott
I know I need to just be patient and wait for Apps users to get Profiles/Plus,
but I don't find it particularly sympathetic of Google when they keep saying
that "everyone" can use Google+ now, even in their financial results
announcements. From the CEO.

(Yes, technically anyone can use it by signing up with a free @gmail.com
account, but I consider that a cop out.)

~~~
tomkarlo
You don't need to use a gmail account. You just need to create a Google login
that isn't an Apps login. You can use the same domain as your apps account - I
use that, just with a slightly different username for Google+

~~~
aprescott
While this is true, it's in the same class of work-around as just registering
a @gmail.com account. It doesn't let an Apps user use their Apps account in a
unified way, which is what I was getting at.

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jpulgarin
Yes, but how many monthly actives?

~~~
famousactress
Exactly. I hate these misuses of the word 'Users'.

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sundar22in
I don't think Google+ will ever be a Facebook killer (Is Bing a Google
killer?). Google's strengths are search and advertising, but not social
networking. Given that Google+ is integrated to many google products, its not
going to die soon IMHO, but it will be just there for sometime (Yahoo/excite
never closed after google success).

Contrary example is gmail which caused a dent in Yahoo mail and still gaining
momentum. But gmail was re-inventing email access (gtalk integration), but
Google+ is no way close to revolutionizing social networking.

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tomahhy
And how many of those accounts are spammers getting in early to build rep and
appear legitimate?

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progworker
The number of users doesn't mean much, everyone is invited now.

~~~
mhb
Unless you're under 18. And the high school demographic seems like it would be
pretty relevant.

~~~
nl
The fact that high-schoolers couldn't join Facebook for years didn't seem to
hurt it too much.

Edit: downvoted?

To quote Wikipedia:

 _The Web site's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard
students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy
League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at
various other universities before opening to high school students, and,
finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumersReports.org on
May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the
site's terms._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook>

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tko
that is a huge gain....but how many of the 40 million users are still using
Google+???

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smackfu
For comparison, Facebook has 800 million users and hit 500 million active
users in a single day.

~~~
nextparadigms
For comparison Facebook is 7 years old and Google+ is 3 months old.

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mhb
Isn't it pretty significant that most high schoolers (under 18) can't even
sign up yet?

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Steko
Something like 20 million of their users are in India, a lot of those look
like Orkut (Google) converts (edit: maybe notsomuch, add FB and look at last
few years).

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=google%20plus%2Cork...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=google%20plus%2Corkut&geo=IN&date=6%2F2011%205m&cmpt=q)

~~~
manojlds
Search doesn't correlate to usage. I don't search for Facebook, but use it a
lot.

~~~
lukesandberg
a lot of people search for facebook. search is just faster than navigating or
bookmarks a lot of the time.

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aswanson
Their naming /branding scheme is not good. Google + sounds like an API
extension or a bad programming language. Sometimes it's better to give a
product a human face...beginning with a name that communicates what it is.

~~~
lallysingh
.. only if you're a programmer, most of whom would probably know what Google+
really is.

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rymedia
Guess it's time I get a google+ account.

