
Robert Scoble calls G+'s "ghost town" reputation "unfair ... simply wrong" - jeffool
https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/bK2ZHJaSnh4
======
citricsquid
Robert Scoble makes his money by having lots of followers, so obviously
follower counts matter to him, but they have absolutely no bearing on whether
or not a site is a "ghost town" or not. I can follow Robert Scoble on G+ and
NEVER interact with any of his content, so can 1,500,000 others (which is what
has happened) and somehow that _isn't_ a ghost town?

If you want real hard evidence that G+ is a ghost town (in that nobody uses
it):

Robert Scoble posted a video yesterday:
[https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJY...](https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJYuub)
and that video got 778 views (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLhi1VUbmc>).

Out of 1,500,000 "followers" on Google+ less than 1,000 take notice of his
posts. That's even worse than Twitter.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
I think you're putting too much value on that one data point in order to prove
the "ghost town" theory. Scoble actually gets crazy amounts of interaction
with his posts. Just look at how many comments each of his posts get, not to
mention that every dicussion is on point and "right there". And it's not just
quantifiable interaction like comments. For example, I generally don't comment
on posts from people I don't know but on an averge day even I will skim
through whatever latest thing Scoble has written...because he's Scoble you
know? His is a kind of self-fueling notoriety. I think it's definitely
arguable whether G+ is a ghost town or not, but Scoble is probably the last
example you should use to argue the pro-ghost-town side.

~~~
citricsquid
Photo gallery from the Golden Gate National Cemetery, +295 and 57 comments.

Photo gallery from his son's graduation, +135 and 31 comments.

Video (that I posted above), +107 with 17 comments.

Video of "Engagio", +40 with 8 comments.

He has 1,500,000 followers and his best post gets ~300 +1's and ~60 comments,
the average post gets ~100 +1s and ~30 comments. The only reason the post
about G+ not being a ghost town is popular is because it was spread around the
internet (eg: HN) and it's flame bait...

> on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has
> written

And will you actually pay attention to it? Consume the content? If you're not
watching the videos he posts or reading his writing you're not engaged. Less
than 1,000 people out of 1,500,000 people clicked on his video, they didn't
even need to watch it for a view to count, just _click_ on it. How can you
claim for one second that he has an engaged audience when less than 0.05% of
his audience click his video. I have better engagement than that on Twitter
and Facebook and I'm some no-name internet guy.

If the engagement levels for posts are less than 1% I don't think it can be
considered active at all. Follower counts are meaningless, I think the
majority of "Social Media" sites get it wrong: someone that followed me 4
years ago probably isn't still (actively) following me today, but if follower
counts only reflected actively engaged users people like Scoble would cry
because it doesn't validate their whole "I'm super popular hire me" shtick.

I've said it before, Scoble is a part of the Mashable type of Social Media,
people subscribe that don't really _care_ about what he says they just
follow/subscribe because of what he represents: Social Media. They feel that
to be relevant in Social Media they have to follow Scoble, just like they have
to read Mashable. They don't care about them or engage with their content,
they just subscribe so they can say they do. Mashable has 2.6m Twitter
followers, tweets an article and gets 6 comments. Worthless.

~~~
kinleyd
I tend to agree that someone like Scoble does not form the best basis to cast
judgement on how engaged G+ is (even though he proves that G+ is not a ghost
town). Apart from his other talents and selling points, he has also benefited
from his being an early adopter of the platform. As such I'd say a large
number of his followers don't hang on to every word or comment he may make.

On the other hand look at the stats of true tech luminaries like Linus
Torvalds: thousands of likes, hundreds of reshares and comments per post.
Torvalds is the kind of guy - with nothing technologically left to prove -
that the G+ community enjoys following very closely. There is no way your G+
stream can be a ghost town if you follow people like Torvalds and far lesser
luminaries (but greatly accomplished folks) on G+.

------
larsberg
G+ feels more like going to some sort of gathering where everybody is off in
groups talking quietly amongst themselves. It's not empty; it's just not very
interesting if you don't know anybody there.

For example, the developers and researchers of compilers for functional
programming languages are there and active, but scrolling through the posts,
I've noticed that all of us (myself included) tend only to make the posts
visible to other compiler developers.

Trying to think about why that is, I can only assume it's because of the
background knowledge problem. If I want to talk about random things I'm doing
in our compiler to this group, I can just type up a thousand words. If I
wanted to do it publicly and have it understandable, I'd have to make a Matt
Might-style blog post, and the only way I would do that is if, like him, I was
already preparing the contents for undergraduate consumption. Or maybe if it
was content I had prepared for a paper that was too introductory and had to be
cut due to page restrictions.

~~~
pthread
True story. I have about 300 people in my circles mostly engineers and the
interaction is great. I'm talking about people involved in FOSS (system
programmers, embedded developers, devops mostly).

I have no idea who R. Scoble is and just by peaking at his profile I have to
say that I have no interest in following him. This is probably why most people
that use Twitter don't fit in the G+ space. As far as I'm concerned most
technical Twitter users are Web developers, the SEO (crap) crowd, designers,
social media whores, guys posting about hipster bands. Not to generalize but
that's how I see it and the reason Twitter is a ghost town for me, Facebook is
useless and G+ is awesome. To each his own.

~~~
eps
There's plenty of technical people active on Twitter, but they don't tweet to
start a conversation, because Twiiter was never actually menat for that. It's
a one-to-many broadcast channel, there are producers and there are consumers.
G+ on the other hand is more of an equal playing field, it's being positioned
as an interaction platform, so it's better fit for discussions and what not.

------
Swizec
I don't use G+ for anything other than spamming links to my blog.
Interestingly enough I have almost 2k "followers" despite never engaging with
anyone beyond the comments on my blogs.

Twitter, on the other hand, I spend my whole days there. It doesn't get as
many clickthroughs to my blog, but it's magnificent for chatting with people
and keeping in touch with interesting people I would like to get to know
(rather than those I already know).

As for FB ... there is still nothing better for organizing group events
between scatterbrained friends.

~~~
udp
_> Interestingly enough I have almost 2k "followers" despite never engaging
with anyone beyond the comments on my blogs._

Are you part of the HN circle, by any chance?

~~~
Swizec
Uhm ... I might be, how do I check?

~~~
udp
Looks like you're in part 2:
<https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/posts>

The circles were generated from a list at <http://hngp.axxim.net/>, but that
seems to be offline now.

------
Steko
Pretty much every "G+ is a ghost town" thread I've read includes the caveat
"unless you're Robert Scoble". Hilariously applicable at this moment.

~~~
vibrunazo
Or a photographer, apparently their community is huge there:

[https://plus.google.com/u/0/109572812341174932454/posts/5D2y...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/109572812341174932454/posts/5D2ymHLVkXE)

~~~
rjsamson
Yeah, G+ had a really great, vibrant photography community. People like Trey
Ratcliff have really done an amazing job getting people engaged there.

------
pooriaazimi
Off-topic: I don't use G+ (or Facebook, for that matter), but I've always
wondered what's with its disgusting, un-humanish urls. It's Scobble's (I
presume): <https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853>

What the hell is that? If you wanted to share you G+ profile (say, to a friend
in a bar) would you have to spell this god-knows-how-much-long id, or is there
a better way (like, plus.google.com/robert_scoble) that I'm not aware of (of
course, without using url shorteners)?

~~~
Raphael
It is odd to neglect readable URLs, especially considering they actually had
that before on profiles.google.com.

~~~
jmelloy
I thought the story was that they were readable User IDs until fairly late in
the dev process, when they realized they were giving away what people's gmail
accounts were.

------
k-mcgrady
I like G+ but it is a ghost town. If you follow enough people you will get
good content but interaction is terrible. In the first few weeks I built up
over 1500 'followers'. If I posed a question I would get responses. Now,
nothing. If I ask a question I may get, at most, one response a few days
later. Compare this with twitter where I have under 300 followers and get
several responses instantly.

I also find that to regularly get new content on G+ I have to follow lots more
people than I do on Twitter. People seem to post a lot less frequently on G+
(a lot of people only post a few times a week). This is a problem for me
because unlike Scoble I don't want to manage circles with tens of thousands of
people. Eventually that will get unmanageable and unlike Scoble management of
my social media accounts isn't part of my job.

~~~
saraid216
I find I get much, much better engagement if I spend time in someone else's
comments.

As for circle management, I've never had an issue with that. I follow 2k
people and I just wait for someone to get annoying before I uncircle them. If
they're never annoying, don't post, or whatever, then I don't notice and it's
no skin off my back. I just circle people with interesting streams and just
watch it come in. I haven't adjusted my circles since August or so when I made
one to share to.

------
tferris
Social bloggers as Scoble are generally useless but this time he raised an
interesting point:

Twitter _is_ the ghost town not G+ and he brought some impressive figures
proving that.

I don't know if he's right, I reduced time in all networks but Twitter is
slightly before G+:

\- FB 1-5 times/day

\- Instagram 1-5 times/week

\- LinkedIn 1-2 times/week

\- Twitter once per week (at max)

\- G+ never

\- Path never

I think his large number of followers on G+ is a result of his very early
engagement on G+ spamming the network around the clock. Moreover, the Twitter
audience is not a perfect match for Scoble—his posts have a special style,
verbose and opinionated and obviously don't appeal to the typical Twitter user
(tech and Internet savvy who are often better informed than Scoble himself).

~~~
DizzyDoo
I use Twitter in a very different way than Facebook though, and for very
different reasons. I follow a small group of smart, funny or creative people
that tweet really interesting stuff, but personally I tweet only a few times a
month. Am I alone in that I don't use Twitter as a social networking tool, and
more of a broadcasting-listening tool?

To anyone looking at my twitter, it might seem extremely quiet and ghost-
townish, but I am using Twitter much more than Facebook and getting more from
it, albeit passively.

~~~
jeffool
Twitter is, for me, very much a "right now" tool. I used to read up on missed
posts, but now I just follow too many people. So I look at the recent history
of a couple of lists, then look at even less of my main stream for interesting
conversations/links.

FB/G+ feel far more involved, even if I'm doing the same thing. I chalk this
up to the conversations being longer, and more in depth/nuanced.

------
lmm
My G+ account really is a ghost town. I would close it if I could figure out
how to without killing my gmail etc.

My twitter account /looks/ like a ghost town, in that I never do anything on
it myself. But I'm using it to follow a bunch of feeds I'm interested in; I
check it regularly. I'm not sure how an outside observer could tell the
difference between the two, other than by counting logins - but for me,
twitter is useful, and G+ is dead.

~~~
k-mcgrady
You can close your Google Plus account in settings. I did it a few months ago.
I later reactivated it and it restored my account with all my followers (it
had removed all my old posts and profile information though). In settings it
will warn you exactly what Google services will be affected by closing your G+
account.

------
Iv
G+ has far less updates that facebook on my account, and that's a feature !

People there don't post they have been wasted yesterday or they ate a
mayonnaise sandwich. They share relevant news. I don't check facebook much
anymore...

------
jeffool
I've long sworn off Facebook, and have always been rather active on Twitter. I
just hope G+ gets a good, functional mobile layout. I'm not sure how I feel
about the current one yet.

Everyone I know is on Facebook, and nearly everyone is on Twitter (with more
joining just this week.) I have a large group of friends from a web community
that all joined G+ at the same time, so, it's a completely valid social
network for me, without having to do any work of reorganizing friends from
high school who add me.

Basically, for me it's a second chance at adding people on a social network,
and this time, with easier tools, I'm getting it right.

~~~
Drbble
Did you see the new iOS and Android versions that launched last week?

~~~
jeffool
I did, thanks! That's the one I'm not sure if I like. The previous one
mundane, but functional. The new one trades in the conversational flow for
ease of interaction (+1-ing, sharing, more options from the stream.) It's an
interesting take, and I'm curious how I'll like it, but I haven't decided yet.

------
angryasian
for everyone that says g+ is a ghost town, you must not be finding people to
follow. The entire point is circles. I'm on g+ everyday, and even has become
my bookmark and evernote replacement, ill post to myself.

~~~
kinleyd
This is often the problem. Unless you are some kind of star in your own right,
the odds are that almost nobody beyond random followers are going to include
you in their circles. That basically leaves you with the option of circling
others in order to have anything meaningful in your stream. Here again you are
more or less guaranteed (in current conditions) that next to none of your
friends/family is going to be on G+. So you are left with the option of
circling strangers only, which is not what you would normally do on a social
network.

The great thing about G+ is that in this large group of strangers there is a
huge number of tech (and other) luminaries who are actively engaging on the
network. Circle them and you basically get a stream of comments, thoughts,
links and pictures that are really worth following. I've only circled about a
100 or so of these "strangers" and I've just loving the interaction. Sure,
nobody (or very few) +1 anything I have to say, but that doesn't bother me as
I'm far more interested in what they have to say. No way you can call it a
ghost town when you engage in G+ this way.

On the other hand, if you circle nobody then it does become a ghost town. But
it would hardly be fair to call it one.

~~~
fpgeek
I wonder if that's part of the point. On other social networks you're
connecting with friends and family. On G+ you're circling strangers whose
thoughts you're interested in. I think I'd prefer to mine the latter if my
goal was to make better search results for you.

~~~
technoslut
The problem is that G+ seems to only get the people who are technology driven.
Even then it's a fraction of that community.

The 'average Joe' doesn't have any use for this. They can follow their friends
on Facebook or follow their favorite celebrities on Twitter.

------
shortformblog
Personal take: G+'s circle system has significant downsides as far as
following people goes, because you can build a significant audience on G+ …
and have no idea where it's coming from. I have 16k followers, most gained in
the past few months, but I haven't updated regularly since January. There's no
way to track this, either. That to me suggests weaknesses in the circle
system.

So, when I read Scoble's comments about having more followers on G+ than
anywhere else, I believe it … and I also believe more than half of them aren't
regularly using G+, either.

------
stephenhandley
G+ is more about building an interest graph than FB, don't use it as a
vanity/foodiate platform and it won't be a ghosttown. I'm mostly on it for
link following and I'm getting super high quality science and tech links in my
feed. the ghost-town characterization is way off base.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Completely agree, only problem is that your interest feed relies on the people
you subscribe to keep their posts related to the interest you associated them
with.

But if the scientists in your NASA circle want to post vacation pictures, you
can't filter that out. You can try and get yourself included into their "Space
News Only" circle, which would solve the problem, but badgering people who
don't know you to do something for you, even little like this, isn't an
optimal solution.

------
gautamc
For me FB is the proverbial ghost town - because I am no longer interested in
the contents of activity feed I get on FB :-p . I am sure my opinions don't
matter much, after all, I don't have thousands of friends on either of the two
services.

But for whatever its worth, I've started to really like G+ since I've started
to follow Linus Torvalds and Stephen Kinsella on G+. I like the drag-drop UI
that "Circles" tab/widget implements and I love the posts that Linus shares
with the public. I don't know if Linus has/uses FB too, but I don't care.

I think that if Google runs G+ long enough and has cool & intelligent people
using/developing it, G+ will not do too bad.

------
NZ_Matt
The people that I see on Google+ use it in a very different way than the
average user uses Facebook. It's much closer aligned to Twitter than Facebook.

The average Facebook user uses it as a tool to keep in touch with family and
friends. Google+ is a ghost town for most new users, a few of my non techie
friends joined Google+ when it first launched and haven't been back since
because their friends are still using Facebook. Scoble and most Google+ users
are outliers. The majority of users want a social network to share with their
friends and they are not interested in following a bunch of random people.

------
franze
hi, just as a note: i can never view Roberts S. posts - because they are not
public, but shared with his circles - and I'm not one of them (i don't want
to, i even once - longlongtimeago - wrote a r.s. filter greasemonkey script
<http://www.facesaerch.com/widget/rs-filter.user.js>). so would be cool - if
it's really newsworthy - to post a pasteboard copy. thx.

~~~
esrauch
That doesn't make any sense. All of his posts that people see are posted to
public.

Posting to your circles is the lists that you have created, he's not curating
lists of >1million people. There isn't any way to limit the visibility of a
post just to people who are following you on google+

~~~
franze
you are right. an anonymous browser tab could access the post. my g+ logged in
browser tab couldn't. means: r.s. blocked me. i'm fine with it. i remember i
once posted a lengthly comment (with lots of numbers, figures using an
advanced statistic methodology called arithmetic) on one of his posts.

so much for googles open web approach: "public" != publicly available if you
are logged in to google+

~~~
Drbble
[http://googleplus.wonderhowto.com/blog/new-google-12-tips-
ma...](http://googleplus.wonderhowto.com/blog/new-google-12-tips-master-
basics-get-you-addicted-0128716/)

Item 2 there claims blockers can view public posts, which seems the intended
behavior.

~~~
franze
then robert must be a superuser && superblocker (or it's a bug, i doubt it,
but also i do not care)

------
egypturnash
Scoble has 1.5 million followers on G+? I submit that followers on G+ are
EASY.

I've been using Livejournal since 2002 and have about 350 followers. I think
maybe a hundred of them are still commenting on my posts intermittently.
(Yeah, I still use LJ.)

I got on G+ when it came out. I have 232 followers. I think maybe three of
them reply to my posts. Sometimes. (Not that I post to G+ a lot but still.)

That's a hell of a lot of followers in about eight months versus like 5-6
years of LJ being a pretty active place. It's not the 1.5mil Scoble has but
it's a hell of a lot for someone who never posts, but seems to see a new
follower every day.

I would also compare and contrast the age and follower count of my Twitter
account, but I'm pretty sure a large percentage of my nearly 600 followers
there are spambots or marketroids, and I don't feel like guesstimating how
many actual humans are following my tweets.

------
digisth
I think some of the issues around this come down to the way we conceive of
these networks (well, and semantics.) They're all called Social Networks, but
that should phrase be construed very broadly. If people are using Facebook to
keep in touch with a small circle, Twitter to a broad audience, and G+ as an
RSS reader with pictures and a +1 button, then they aren't the same thing at
all. Feet, bikes, and cars are all kinds of transportation, but they're
thought of differently. We don't talk about the failures of feet because
people don't walk enough. It's how and why these things are being used that
defines what they are.

Perhaps if Google embraced (and re-branded) itself as a content network/social
content network/RSS reader with glowing bells things would be understood (and
talked about) differently.

------
physicslover
As someone else mentioned, I find the signal to noise ratio to be much higher
on G+ than facebook or twitter. I mainly use these tools for two purposes,
keeping in touch with friends and following interesting people and topics.

Facebook wins for the former as most of my friends still aren't on G+ or
twitter, however, most of the activity is uninteresting checkins and the like.

With twitter, I have followed people I am interested in for topical content,
but I mostly see personal tweets and find myself quickly scrolling through
them for an occasional interesting link. Also, the interaction is next to zero
except for retweets. I don't think the medium lends itself to much more than
light banter.

In contrast, on plus, the topical content is more informative often with
interesting comments.

------
dgudkov
I use G+ more frequently than FB and I enjoy better signal/noise ratio in my
G+ streams. I suppose both FB and G+ miss interest-based approach which makes
them still more noisy than they should be.

------
javery
Would you rather have 200k followers who see everything you say (twitter) or
1.5M followers who never login and check out what is going on? Simple choice
for me.

This is also the natural evolution of social networks - when they start the
social media guys are the most followed because they are the most active, then
they are eclipsed by true celebrities. Scoble added 30k followers on twitter
in 3 months - Howard Stern added 150k in the same time frame, Rihanna added 5M
followers.

------
robryan
Have they made it easier to follow say someones tech updates only. I remember
early on there was the issue that circles didn't work when you were circling
someone but they weren't circling you, so you would get their public updates,
but that lost the ability to segregate to what people are interested in.

------
jsz0
I have no doubt his feed, or whatever Google calls it, is very active. Problem
is mine is not. Last time I checked the newest update was almost 3 months old.
Which experience is more common? Mine or his? He's stoking social media nearly
24x7 and is a fairly high profile tech something or another.

------
antidoh
It's a _really big_ ghost town.

------
sad_panda
My G+ feed isn't very active, but the signal to noise ratio is higher. That's
fine by me.

------
udkl
I'm not really acquainted/read about Robert, but it seems like he is defending
his earlier positive take on Google+.

I, like most others take an opposite stance on the matter that G+ indeed is a
ghost town.

Bashed Google+ a couple of days after it was launched :
<http://on.fb.me/LtMkTN>

------
Cosman246
Of course, nobody _heard_ his comments because he posted them on G+.

------
ddon
Can't read his post, safari crashes on iPad :)

------
falling
Why are people listening to Scoble? Why do we see him posted here only when he
says that G+ is not desert?

(of course it's not desert for him: his follower count is the closest
approximation to G+'s total user count)

------
yanw
It's the result of PR attacks and sadly they seem to be working.

Some of those writing are just parroting PR pitches and some just seem to
depend on their limited experience with he service.

Also considering that the number of active users is but a fraction of the
overall number of those who signed up (yet still a considerable amount) it's
not fair to divide active minutes between all registered users. It might be a
"ghost town" in comparison to Facebook but so is every other social service
the tech blogs seem to be paddling, it's just that + is a bigger target for PR
attacks.

~~~
cliffbean
Besides PR campaigns, I wonder if another source of hostility to Google+ is a
normal human reaction to the fact that social networking, as we currently know
it, is a natural monopoly.

A lot of people are in the situation where they're going to have to be on
Facebook no matter what (hello lock-in), and they'd really rather not have to
be on Google+ at the same time. It'd be all the annoying parts of social
networking doubled, plus the hassle of maintaining two copies of a lot of
information, with no significant advantages.

I think a lot of people who disparage Google+ would have no major objection if
it could quickly take over from Facebook and become the new monopoly. However,
by this point it seems unlikely, barring a major event.

A world where social networking services could interoperate, sort of like how
we have numerous telephone companies but one global namespace of phone
numbers, would be interesting.

------
piyushpr
How much google paid him to write that ? :P

