
Google+ Suddenly Looks Pretty Busy For A Ghost Town - Anon84
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/09/google-plus-open/all/1
======
wh-uws
All the early adopters in my circle of friends tried it for about a month and
quit in July. By quit I mean they still have accounts but no longer post
content.

I closed my account about 2 weeks ago and in the form that asked me why, I
cited the fact that I could not hide my name and keep my full privacy if I
chose.

I think in retrospect (as I agree with the consensus that the jury is still
out.) the nails in G+'s coffin will have been.

\- Not allowing people to keep there name's private.

\- 2 not opening to the public before facebook could implement their killer
feature (only sharing things with the people I want to ala Circles)

\- Lastly in some relation to the first point I think it was a huge mistake to
make the 1 percent people (the extroverts who don't mind sharing with the
whole world aka your Robert Scoble's and Tim O'Reilly) the cornerstone of the
product.

You have to get a critical mass to gain the network effects needed to keep a
social network interesting and those people can go along way but the long tail
of people will prefer the ability to be more private

------
X-Istence
I keep hearing over and over that Google+ is doomed, that it is no longer
being used, but each time I look at my own activity and realise I am posting
more than I used to ever post before on Google+ but it is not going to
everyone. I've got a circle for technical people, for college friends, for
family and I can selectively post content to each one. Only rarely do I post
something public and most of the time it is meant for wider consumption, or it
is a link to my latest blog post.

Does Google+ have things it needs to add to become more useful? Absolutely,
but I have found more engagement and user interaction on Google+ than on
Facebook, mostly because I can curate the content to a specific subset of my
circles thus making the content more relevant to those people, thus getting
higher quality feedback from many different people.

I get higher click throughs to links on Google+ than I do on Facebook or
Twitter, and I get more insightful and interesting debate on Google+ than
those other two. That in my book is a win.

~~~
wh-uws
Facebook just rolled out this feature a few days ago. That was Google+'s major
edge to me but it would have needed my whole network on it to be useful.

Now that facebook has it, it is going to be _very_ hard to get people to use
something else.

~~~
richardw
The edge, for me, is that I actively want to keep FB friends and family only,
but would also like a separate public persona. G+ is Twitter for people who
don't know that 140 characters is a feature.

~~~
itswindy
That's not really something that helps Google. They want everyone there, not
just self-proclaimed 'early adopters.'

------
coderdude
I tried to get into Google+ but there really isn't a reason to switch. I have
no complaints with Facebook. They have the people I want to talk to and the
features I like. They've made a lot of changes in response to G+. I now have
better control over who can see which messages and I can organize my friends
into lists. I really don't have the time to watch over two social networks. At
this point any competitor to Facebook is going to be a hard sell.

G+ may look pretty busy right now because they opened it up for everyone but I
think most people will have the same reaction I did -- it gets old quick.

~~~
kkowalczyk
In my usage G+ is not at all like Facebook.

The big difference is that Facebook is highly oriented towards "small circle
of people I know in real life" and slowly opening up things to be more public.

G+ is highly oriented towards public with features to allow more private
sharing. It's more like Posterous, really, than Facebook.

The concrete difference is that on Facebook I follow friends and coworkers, on
G+ I follow Scoble, Tim O'Reilly, Alton Brown and other people who write
interesting, public posts.

My G+ usage is pretty orthogonal to Facebook usage and is more like following
blogs in an RSS reader.

~~~
jaredsohn
>The concrete difference is that on Facebook I follow friends and coworkers,
on G+ I follow Scoble, Tim O'Reilly, Alton Brown and other people who write
interesting, public posts.

With Facebook's new follow feature (released this week) you can follow those
people on Facebook as well.

Facebook even partially solves the Scoble problem by asking you if you want to
subscribe to all, some, or only the most important posts from a person and
Blake Ross has mentioned that they may be doing further things to help filter
what you see on your wall (perhaps classify posts by subject?)

------
AllenKids
Despite its questionable color palette, G+ does looks nicer than Facebook.

But my stream looks like a RSS feeds more than anything, people I know IRL
stopped posting months ago, pundits I follow post largely the same thing I can
get elsewhere and the comments are no more interesting or constructive than
say HN or Quora.

I do want to keep using it but have no idea what's the point.

~~~
thomasgerbe
"I do want to keep using it but have no idea what's the point."

Pretty much.

Twitter covers my need to follow people not within my immediate network.

And 99% of my friends primarily post on Facebook.

------
dmk23
The feature G+ is missing the most is being able to use it to post into
Facebook and Twitter. I like the idea of having an alternative to Facebook, I
would love to see G+ succeed, but the real problem is the time it requires to
manage multiple incompatible social network presences. The thing Google could
do is to make G+ a dashboard to control all your other social accounts. I hope
they realize that this is one of the biggest issues for people like myself who
would like to switch but are scarce on time to completely migrate their entire
social network.

~~~
Anon84
Have you checked out <http://sgplus.me/>? I've been using it for a while to
cross post from G+ to Facebook and Twitter. Works extremely well!

(although the image that pops up in Facebook is rarely the same one I picked
on G+).

~~~
dmk23
Thanks, will definitely check it out. Still, this is the sort of thing Google
should have rolled out themselves as part of G+. Having a tool like this could
be one of most significant tools for their user retention.

------
r00fus
I prefer to use G+ to post stuff I don't want leaving a certain group (ie,
pics of the kids and family, etc). I mainly share with my family circle and
sometimes "tweet" links to my friends and family circle.

I have no need or time to play the Facebook game (was fun at first, but all-
consuming in the end and not worthwhile).

Google+ is Facebook for grown-ups and families, and it works as designed for
me. I use LinkedIn for all my work-related social networking, which pretty
much covers the rest.

------
mark_l_watson
I am surprised by the negative comments. I admit that I only post to G+ once
or twice a week, but I have some very interesting people in my circles and use
G+ about as often as Twitter to find cool/useful stuff to read and experiment
with.

All that said, nothing replaces _owning_ your own domain for your content and
having your blog as a sub-domain. Own and control your stuff.

Mostly my current use of web search is just searching for runtime error
messages or APIs. For leads on new trends, etc. I trust the people I associate
with on Twitter and G+ to point me to great tech material.

------
jamesgagan
my feed is definitely still a ghost town...i think all the tech savvy people i
know kind of gave up on it and people like my parents and in-laws etc are not
likely to ever join.

~~~
cgranade
YMMV. I'm definitely not in a ghost town over there. People like Andrea
Kuszewski do a lot to generate high-quality content, and keep the conversation
going. While my Facebook is more active, sure, my G+ account is where things I
care about are happening.

------
mikeryan
Is it me or did the author equate new features to active users in the lead?

~~~
Hisoka
Yup, I got that sense too. Yes, G+ looks busy.. but throwing 1000 features and
100 programmers isn't the same as millions of active users interacting with
your product. You can look busy all you want, doesn't really matter

------
alanh
Not sure why Wired is so pro-Google+. Their latest issue had a piece based on
the premise it was a success. But I see usage levels under 1% of Facebook’s
and under 5% of Twitter’s, judging by numbers on those infernal social widgets
across the web (and also as observed among my friends).

Do they have some vested interest?

------
Joeboy
Is anybody else out there using, and quite liking, Diaspora? I was deeply
sceptical about it until recently but it's actually pretty usable (although
not bug-free).

I'm joeboy@diasp.org if you want to be in my HN aspect :-)

------
scumola
I gave up on G+ a while ago. Adding screen sharing, whiteboards and all of
that crap isn't going to make me come screaming back. G+ just doesn't have it.

~~~
itswindy
_G+ just doesn't have it._

They sure do. For an identity service that is. This is not social, it's a
honeypot to get your information, or the information Google still doesn't
have.

~~~
itswindy
Funny, someone took a point. Must be a new Googler still going through their
employee manual:)

From Eric Schmidt: " And the notion of strong identity was never invented in
the Internet. Many people worked on it - I worked on it as a scientist 20
years ago, and it’s a hard problem. So if we knew that it was a real person,
then we could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, we could
give them things, we could you know bill them, you know we could have credit
cards and so forth and so on, there are all sorts of reasons.... So the
solution of course that we’ve come up with is called Google+, which is in
essentially early beta, and it looks like it’s doing very well so far. It
essentially provides an identity service with a link structure around your
friends, similar to what I just described...."

