

Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed - kercker
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/google-grows-like-facebook/

======
bigiain
I wonder how much this is because Google is pulling some "hang on, didn't you
guys used to be the 'don't be evil' company" shit like this:
[http://sfappeal.com/news/2012/12/google-adds-bizarre-
require...](http://sfappeal.com/news/2012/12/google-adds-bizarre-requirement-
for-sfpds-bike-theft-workshop-attendees.php)

A community event organized by the city, with speakers from the local police
department, "helpfully" hosted by Google, who then, without asking or even
telling the organizers and promoters, append some self-serving bullshit
attendance requirements:

"According to the RSVP page for the event, admission to the bicycle theft
event is guaranteed only if community members include a link to their Google
Plus Local profile with five or more reviews."

and:

'None of the San Francisco city officials who organized the event, it seems,
knew about the marketing language Google inserted on the RSVP page.

"You know you try and do something good, you try and do something for the
community and something like this happens," Officer Carlos Manfredi, an SFPD
spokesperson told The Appeal in apparent frustration.'

The SFPD believed the workshop was open to members of the community, and
everyone in the community was able to attend. "That's what the flyer said,"
Manfredi said."

Stay classy Google...

------
xiaoma
For me, the thing keeping me off of Google+ is that it's linked to my other
accounts. Violations (or even suspected violations) of copyright and a long
list of other things could get the entire account in trouble. I say this as
someone who has received copyright notices on content I produced entirely on
my own.

I would never want to jeopardize my Gmail or Adsense. It's much better to get
my social fix from any other company.

~~~
bad_user
This is exactly how I feel.

And it's not just about email either. I also use my Google Drive account. I
also have a couple of purchases on Google Play. I had photos in Picasa at some
point too.

Google blocking your account means you lose access to all of this. Which is
why using Blogger or Google+ is a liability.

------
redwood
Ridiculous to compare usage numbers between the two considering Facebook at
that point (e.g. when they were at 100mil users) had no dominant products that
its users were using _every day_. In other words when Facebook users went to
Facebook, they really meant to.

With G+, the monthly stats are meaningless since they're probably
representative of Gmail logins who accidentally click on +.

~~~
fl3tch
G+ has 135 million "stream active" users. Those are people who really meant to
go to plus.google.com, not click something in Gmail.

~~~
paganel
> Those are people who really meant to go to plus.google.com

I actually did that at least a couple of times last month by mistake, the G+
link is very close to the Inbox/Home link in GMail's web app. I cursed and hit
the back button in a matter of seconds each and every time.

~~~
taligent
Add me to the list of people who have indadvertedly engaged with Google+.

Would be interesting to know how much people have accidentally done the same.

------
kryptiskt
Nothing quite underscores Google's desperation like the "you can't view
Google+ content if you're a logged-out Google user"-trick they pull. What the
hell is the deal with that? Are the little check marks they can put in the
Active Users column really worth the bad experience they are giving those same
users who just wanted to read the post?

Sure, it's a little niggle, nothing worth complaining about. The grating thing
is that they went out of their way to create a roadblock, even casting aside
the pretension that logged-out means something.

~~~
tytso
If someone posts a URL to a G+ post, you can most certainly view it without
being logged-in. (Try it: go to your G+ stream, and then for a post, select
"Link to this post" on the drop-down menu, then past that into a Incognito
window --- you'll be able to view the post.) You can also view a user's G+
profile, and view all of their public posts, without being logged in.

Yes, you won't be able to create a stream and follow a set of users without
creating a G+ account --- but without a G+ account, there's no place to
actually store the set of users / G+ pages / G+ communities that you're
interested in....

~~~
nwh
It's strange that I hear that from a lot of G+ users. I personally find that
when I try to visit even links from HN pointing toward G+ posts, I am forced
(well, prompted) to log in. For that reason alone I've never actually seen a
post on google plus.

~~~
spot
prompted and forced are two different things.

~~~
nwh
It still refused to show me any content until I logged in. I was trying to
imply that I refused to.

------
nitochi
I think this responds to Facebook's continuous decline in service. They have
messed up the algorithms so bad that News Feeds tend to be more static than
ever before, back in the good days, people checked Facebook a hundred times a
day because there was something new all the time. Today, if you check your
Facebook 5 times during the day and you will probably get the same news as
before.

They also pissed all their page owners off with Edge Rank, which was rolled
out too aggressively for my taste. Since not every facebook page owner is a
facebook or SMM genius, a lot of small pages lost a lot of engagement, which
turns into less engagement on the site overall (from users and page admins).

I started using G+ a couple of months ago because of their Hangouts, but am
gradually becoming more engaged on the site. Facebook will fall, and pretty
soon I think. Too much spam, horrible filters and crappy customization on your
share settings make it a shitty service now. As G+ emphasizes share settings
control, I can see why it will take over pretty fast, they just need to gain a
little more momentum.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Plus, the only ads that seem to work for advertisers on Facebook are scams.

All the other revenue is coming from companies who aren't measuring. But soon,
they'll realize what a waste it is, and once they pull out CPC is going to
dive. And if Facebook decides to artificially inflate CPC, fewer people who
aren't running scams won't pay.

------
fleitz
Which would be great if checking a feed meant more than logging into your
gmail. Also it would be super if it were still 2006 and the only way to sign
up was a .edu account. Since it's 2012 and most of the activity is driven by
Gmail I'd say it's a glacial pace.

When your marketing tools are the frontdoor of the internet as well as
everyone's INBOX, and you're outdone by 11 guys with an iPhone only
photosharing app, you know you're doing something wrong.

It's a service so bad you can't even be forced to use it. It's as pathetic as
MSN.com not being the front page of the internet despite 90% of computers
defaulting to it.

~~~
ajross
I guess. I check it every day. It's true that G+ is driven more by "interest
communities" than by "friends and family links". Most of my activity there is
reading and occasionally commenting on the posts of people more famous than I.
So I think it's fair to say it hasn't achieved Facebook's level of success.
Nor, perhaps, will it any time soon.

But again, I check it every day, which is the same thing I do with Facebook.
If you want my eyeballs for an ad, either platform provides the same value.
I'm probably not typical, but I'm not completely weird either.

I think you can only look at G+ as a success at this point. Just not a success
on the scale of Google Search or Facebook.

~~~
creativityland
Most people I see on G+ when I approach them and ask in person did not even
know they had a G+ account... but guess what, they did have a Google Account
for Youtube and Gmail.

You can see more and more G+ integration into Youtube, why not just turn
Youtube into G+ altogether?

~~~
mkr-hn
Have you seen the new version? It's practically a G+ skin for YouTube.

~~~
creativityland
Yes. It sure looks like they are taking over YouTube and combining it into G+
as last ditch effort.

------
salimmadjd
Google+ has a very low engagement, even looking at Neilsen's 2012 data. I
stopped using it a long ago, with the exception of the alerts I get on gmail
which is probably the number google is using. I feel they should have stayed
exclusive far longer, but that opportunity is long gone now.

~~~
wyclif
Nope, sorry. 135 million active users cannot be considered "low engagement" by
any metric out there, even by Neilsen.

~~~
salimmadjd
Engagement is different than active users. I can click the red button on my
gmail account once a month and be considered active. Engagement is how much
time I spend on the site. I'm on HN everyday commenting and reading. That's
engagement, but I'm never on G+

~~~
wyclif
Sounds like classic extrapolating from personal use to me. "I'm never on G+"
doesn't have anything to do with how many engaged, active users they have, and
they have a lot.

~~~
salimmadjd
Not really. I have like 8000 followers. I'm basing it on observing their
activity as well as mine.

------
10098
The only problem with g+ is that none of my friends use it. Personally I'd
choose g+ over facebook's shitty interface and quality any day.

~~~
bratsche
I pop into Google+ occasionally, but I usually regret it. They always blast me
with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who I don't follow, and as
often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones
suck and every time he is forced to use one for even a few seconds he has a
sudden urge to physically vomit.

At my undergrad school we had some preacher who used to hang out at a certain
spot in the middle of campus and yell at passing students to tell them what
sinners they are. Google+'s "what's hot and popular" often feels like the
Internet's version of that spot, except it's for those whose religion is based
on smartphones.

I definitely agree about the interface. Google+ has a beautiful interface for
viewing these types of posts. Facebook's interface seems to be a little too
optimized for viewing George Takei posts for my taste.

~~~
haakon
> They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who
> I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching
> about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even
> a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit.

At least for me, these posts have gradually changed into embarassing images
with trifles about friendship and love, as well as images with
pseudoscientific and borderline superstitious claims about health etc. This
"facebookification" has lead me to believe that Google+ is now really taking
off. Honestly I'd rather have the kneejerk tech rants back.

------
masnick
I wonder how they calculate active uses. I check Google+ maybe once a
month...am I counted in there?

I wish these statistics were reported in user-hours/month or some other unit
that provided real information. I suspect this wouldn't look good for Google
though.

~~~
mtgx
Yes, but Facebook counts it the same way. If you like something once a month,
you're an active user.

------
shasta
Here's what Google should have done instead of Google+. (As for the OP,
Google+ is a ghost town. It doesn't matter much how often people pass through
and see the tumbleweed blowing around if they're not staying and
contributing.)

First, they should not make people register for Google+. They shouldn't even
call it Google+. It should just be a feature added to gmail: pages. You create
gmail pages and you manage access to gmail pages. Access is not granted to
other "Google+" accounts (there's no such thing), but to any set of email
contacts. Access may also be made public, in which case a gmail page acts as a
lightweight blog post (though you might require login to comment).

That's it. Rather than sending a friend an invitation to Google+, you'd send a
link to an interesting gmail page. If it's access controlled (not public),
then when they click to retrieve it, if they don't have the cookie yet, they'd
need to check their email and click the Google just sent.

In many respects, it should function just like Google+ does now. Pages would
have posts, pictures, comments, live chats, hang-outs, games, whatever. And
once you're on a gmail page, you could browse up to the author's profile page
and see whatever other pages they'd made visible to you. The major difference
is that you could send content to anyone without the stupid "are you on
Google+?" conversation that has to happen first now and thus can build pages
without worrying too much about whether the ghost town will become a popular
tourist destination.

~~~
patrickaljord
That was Google Buzz, didn't work out to too well.

------
Evgeny
The only reason I recently created the account on Google+ was to be able to
'author' my blog posts so that they appear nicely in Google search results (as
described here, for example:
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportance...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportanceOfRelmeAndRelauthorOnYourContentsSEOAndGoogle.aspx)
)

But I'm sure they counted me ...

~~~
WalterGR
The only reason I created an account was because they kept spamming me with
"People you may know," and the only way to opt out of the spam was to...
create a Google+ account.

------
alayne
When you see that many conditionals, there's usually marketing bullshit going
on.

------
michaelochurch
These are meaningless numbers, for reasons already given in this thread, but
Google+ _is_ a good product. In fact, I remember in June 2011 how, after it
launched, there was a lot of press about how great it was. That applause was
well-earned, in my opinion. The engineers who built it did a very good job,
and the problems that Google+ has faced have been strategic in nature.

On the other hand, Google+ needed, strategically, to get real use, and so far
it hasn't been seeing much of that. Hangouts are useful, but the idea that
people would use them as Google intended (as a "cool" emergent social behavior
rather than something people would only do with people they know well) was
hopeless without a context (such as a board game, a great tool for overcoming
the initial social awkwardness that is common among interesting people) that
could encourage the "hanging out". Without such a context squarely in the
center, people won't use hangouts for more free-form purposes than "regular
old" video chat. It's an admirable vision, though.

This is why, in my short time at Google, I was obsessed with raising the issue
of game quality, even though I was nowhere near that team (there was zero G+
activity in New York). I realized that Games had the potential to be a
critical battle for the product's ability to establish itself and get users
_comfortable_ with product. With social network fatigue in an advanced state
ca. 2011, the _only_ thing that could get people in a new general-purpose
social network for long enough to get comfortable with the thing _was_ high-
quality games (not Zynga shit). Google blew it on that one, resulting in a
missed opportunity that can be measured in the tens to hundreds of millions,
and possibly billions.

Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people still know of me, and
I honestly have no clue) comes from the fact that I raised the game quality
issue and drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary to Google's
professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos). It was that, and the fact that,
when the shit hit the fan, I did some white-hat trolling and outed unethical
management (eng-misc) instead of just taking it.

~~~
jmillikin

      > Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people
      > still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes
      > from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and
      > drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary
      > to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos).
    

It is unlikely that the Google engineers present during your employment will
ever forget you. Indeed, the story of Michael Church continues to echo
throughout mailing lists across all of engineering.

However, I doubt this is only because you irritated senior executives by
sending them rambling manifestos about the inherent superiority of your self-
designed card game. Although that may have been the origin of your legend, it
was not truly cemented until you cross-posted them to a company-wide mailing
list and then engaged in a flamewar against all comers.

After your resignation, some of us compared notes on who had received the most
disproportionate response to criticism. I was sure that being called a child
molester in reply to pointing out your lack of credible accomplishment would
win me first, but sadly I did not even place in the top three.

~~~
Locke1689
OK, that's enough of that.

I was an intern during this bullshit. To anyone not "in the know" on this:
there's nothing to know. There was a big pointless flame war on an internal
listserv at Google over some objections that Michael had to how Google runs
certain things. Googlers disagreed. I'll say that I disagreed with Michael,
but the people on the other side are almost as responsible for letting
themselves be sucked into such a stupid flame war.

There is nothing interesting here. This is a Google soap opera. The rest of HN
can comfortably go on with their lives without worrying.

~~~
yuhong
I think michaelochurch did have real points. For example, look up Google+
nymwars.

~~~
bad_user
Facts have value irregardless of whom communicates them.

For opinions on the other hand reputation matters a lot. You can't seriously
give credibility to somebody with an obvious ax to grind, with an agenda and
with a certain history. Even if that opinion seems valid, you may just be
suffering from confirmation bias and at the very least you should seek out
that confirmation from people you can trust.

~~~
michaelochurch
I don't think you can trust any of the vocal Googlers who come out on these
threads. Nor do I think they should be considered representative of Google.
There are a lot of good people at Google-- probably most of them-- but they
aren't especially active on Google-centric threads. What you get on these are
people who see any acknowledgment of Google's imperfections as a _personal_
attack on them.

There's a lot of good, and there's some bad, to Google. Whenever I post
honestly about the place, there are 3 or 4 people who consistently come out
for a fight. I don't mind that they exist and do what they do, because it's
free entertainment for me, but regarding "people you can trust"... anyone who
trusts them over me is too stupid to live. Trust me or trust none of us.

I am not claiming to be unbiased, and my experience at Google is rather
limited. (I was there in what I've been told were the worst 6 months for the
company's culture.) However, I learned an incredible amount in that time (more
than most people learn in 10 years) about what happens to make good companies
go bad.

------
nate_martin
I'd really like to know exactly how much time the average user spends on G+
per month in comparison to Facebook. The only reason I ever go on it is to see
what Linus has posted.

------
killermonkeys
Facebook has a significant fraction of the world Internet population (about
41%). Google has far less (about 6%?). Growing as fast as Facebook is great
(better than growing more slowly) but the marginal effort to acquire a user is
much higher for Facebook than for Google. You can't compare the growth rate of
Google+ to Facebook any more than you can compare Google's growth rate to
Bing.

~~~
graue
Read the article again. It's comparing Plus's growth rate to that of Facebook
when Facebook had the same number of users (~100mil).

------
hobbyist
I read a meme some time back which asked, what is something that everyone has
but rarely use it?

Answer: google+

~~~
seoguru
Lots of people use it a lot, here are 4 interesting streams, note the number
of comments for posts: <https://plus.google.com/+nicolesy/posts>
<https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts>
<https://plus.google.com/117176908342196183611/posts>
<https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MikeElgan/posts>

Lots of g+ is hidden of course because people don't post everything publicly.
I like g+ much better than facebook and wish my non geeky friends and family
would come over to it.

~~~
taligent
Firstly, I HATE that UI. It's slow, clunky and cluttered. Secondly, you have
deliberately some of the most popular people on Google+. In particular Guy
Kawasaki. It's not representative of a typical user.

------
jan_g
I see a lot of bashing in this thread, but those numbers might actually be
true, because of the explosion of Android on mobile phones. There's high
probability that lots of activity comes from mobile users.

------
sdafdasdfasdf
"Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their
Google+ streams each month"

I usually check mine accidentally, one every few weeks. I have an account and
lots of circles that are populated, but I don't post on it or look at others
posts unless someone points me to something which happens once every month or
two.

They should have stats on the number of hits G+ gets vs. FB. I know many of
you use G+, but you are in a bubble. It isn't as big as FB and won't be
anytime soon.

------
erikpukinskis
I wonder how many of those are, like me, people who accidentally switch to
Google+ while trying to tap the tiny links atop other Google properties on
their mobile phones.

------
sytelus
Interesting metric would be the number of people who posted at least one
content item every month for past quarter. Here the content item =
status/+1/like/comment/photo/URL.

Write metric is more robust than read metric, especially against users who are
simply using FB or G just to login into other sites or apps.

------
loceng
I wonder how, or if, these metrics will be affected by their recent change of
free business accounts; It's a gamble for Google, as it may take a few years
for numbers to de-stabilize.

------
martindale
I wish we'd stop comparing Google+ to monolithic "social networks" as if it
weren't exactly what the name implies, the next iteration on top of _all of
Google._

------
ErikAugust
G+ is very pedestrian. There's no draw outside of Hangouts.

------
polarix
This information could be nicely replaced by a comparison graph, similar to
what you would expect when comparing the runs of two stocks over time.

~~~
martinced
Make that "comparison graphs". Show how many people use FB email, how many
people use FB as a Web search engine, how many people use FB to edit office
documents, how many people use the browser created by FB ; ) , etc.

Google+ seems to be, albeit slowly, achieving escape velocity. My G+ feed is
definitely getting more and more interesting and I begin to see non-techies
post there (people who previously only used FB).

135 millions active users vs 1 billion is _not_ something to dismiss,
especially seen the rest of their entire stack.

------
restlessdesign
Nice try, Google.

------
quattrofan
I've spent more time on G+ than FB for most of this year. I pretty much am
once a week on FB and daily on G+.

------
caycep
and this compares with ludicrous speed how?

------
iamtherockstar
I have my feed open a lot, but not because I'm reading it. It's because I
opened the tab, clicked "Start a Hangout", and that Hangout window opened in a
new window. The feed window is now hidden by the Hangout window, so the
analytics might be skewed.

