

Google+ Sees its First Downturn in Traffic - rancar2
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/google-minus/

======
badclient
Not to cry wolf, but imo Google+ is close to deadpool. To understand that, you
have to realize how _high_ of a ceiling anything like G+ coming out of Google
would have to meet. It's incredibly high: they were taking on facebook.

Unfortunately, from their behavior and celebratory posts about the success,
they seemed to act as if the ceiling was a lot lower. I can understand if the
team needs some internal celebrations but fueling it in the media imo does not
help google plus. The media would go crazy either way. A more mature response
from google would have been "this is _nothing_ " - instead they prefer their
PR hacks to to push a mostly useless stat like signup numbers.

Celebrating 10 million users? Give me a break. It shows a fundamental
misunderstanding of how social works. Facebook has always been about _usage_.
And sure, you can argue that they only talk about usage because people use
facebook _a lot_. By the same logic, when google+ does not talk about _usage_
(preferring to talk about the less relevant signup numbers), what does that
tell about G+? Hmm.

Going gaga and fueling the tech media to give you more coverage? I'd argue any
tech coverage of google plus _hurts_ it more than helps it.

Meet Google+, the new twitter - unless they do something radically different.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I have to disagree. In the last month I have spent literally 10 times the
amount of time on G+ than on Facebook because I have been enjoying it more
than FB.

I also think the ugly little black bar across all Google apps is the secret
sauce: while using other Google products, I see some G+ event and sometimes I
drift over to G+ for a minute or two.

I realize that I am not a typical web user, but to me the high value on the
web is Google products (including search for work related stuff), Netflix
streaming, and Amazon. Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo News, ACM Portal and Hulu+ are
not major draws but I still value them.

------
abarth
[http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5057/5474607769_1edc4494a4.jp...](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5057/5474607769_1edc4494a4.jpg)

------
grimen
I still don't get why people don't see that Google+ is like Facebook for
companies, partners, consultants, clients, "and such". It's in fact invaluable
in that sense. We use a Cicle for our startup which with Hangout basically
replaces Skype. The thing is that we later plant to have a circle for devs,
and a circle for managment, etc - and I'm sure this applies to any company
size. How much would say IKEA cut their infrasturcture and communication costs
if they had "a corporate twitter (between people, or machines, or both - like
a collective intelligence), a support page for customers out, an interaction
capabilities with new or existing teams/customers/subgroups" all in one
system? Do the math. Google had enough credibility for a huge company as H&M
to replace their old systems with Google Apps. It's not a Facebook killer,
it's a business enhancer.

------
Hyena
Wouldn't our evaluation depend a lot on your model of how invites would spread
across the social graphs of users? I'd think that the user base would expand
until the sub-marginal user had been invited. Given that the value of the
network is largely determined by the user base, that user might be found
fairly early in the invite process.

Given that G+ probably had a heavily concentrated set of initial invites, I
think it's a safe bet that it's largely done growing for now. That's probably
good for Google, though; I imagine it makes the feedback better for this stage
of development while being fairly easy to handle.

------
blackboxxx
Google+ is too late to win the social media throne. It's boring and only
superficially different.

The only way Google+ can survive and not shrivel up like Wave is to stop
trying to be Facebook 2.

Be different Google. Don't be boring.

------
yanw
This is as useless as watching stock prices go up and down every day. G+ is a
long term project.

It also has another launch in it's future (when it drops the invite only
limitation) and they have yet to introduce an API or a game section or a
proper photo app, all of which will draw attention and traffic.

