

Google+ Is Outpacing Twitter - talhof8
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-plus-is-outpacing-twitter-2013-5

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habosa
I know the numbers are inflated due to tie-in with other Google services, but
I'm very optimistic about Google+ long term.

I got my invite in the first wave and pretty much immediately ditched the
service. I just didn't see why I'd use it. I am a light Facebook user and I
don't Tweet.

Recently I decided to give G+ another try and I love what I am seeing. First
of all, the site is a pleasure to use and the mobile app is by far best in
class. Second, I think G+ is absolutely the best social network for those who
are interested in following people outside of their friends. Celebrities on
Facebook have something to sell, and on Twitter there's not enough room, but
on G+ I get long, interesting posts from famous people around the world.

I only have a few friends on G+ but I am starting to check it more and more
and I can say without a doubt that if it ever hits critical mass I'll be the
first to drop Facebook. Google simply has the latecomer's advantage, they got
to watch Facebook stumble and build around those obstacles at their own pace.

Also, Google+ sign-in is a great developer product. The deep-linking concept
is a very interesting implementation of sharing for mobile apps that borrows
from Android's intent system.

~~~
edwardunknown
Google+ will be a fine replacement for Facebook when everybody gets the signal
that FB has entered it's Newscorp-era Myspace phase. But there's another
possibility: Facebook may end up leaving such a bad taste in people's mouths
that it will be replaced by _nothing_. Both G+ and FB may fade away as the
world collectively says "fuck this".

You might say I'm a dreamer.

~~~
cantankerous
It makes sense that G+ could outlive Facebook if only because it's so tightly
integrated with a suite of products that are so widely used, where Facebook's
primary external integration is through apps that aren't essential to the day-
in-day out...at least not yet.

I think Facebook has become to tightly woven into peoples' lives, though, that
it's going to live on for quite some time. It all really depends on where the
kids decide to go, methinks..

~~~
w1ntermute
> It all really depends on where the kids decide to go, methinks..

And as of late, the kids have been ditching Facebook because it's not cool
anymore.

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vor_
This has been explained before. Google+ numbers can be misleading because
they're tied to other services. The article mentions this:

"The reasons behind Google Plus's growth -- it now can boast 359 million
active users, up 33 percent from 269 million users at the end of June 2012,
according to GlobalWebIndex -- are complex and tied to Google's effort to
build a connecting layer across all its services, including search, YouTube,
maps and other products. Log into one, and you've logged into the lot."

~~~
adventured
And Twitter's numbers are extraordinarily misleading, because so many of their
accounts are fake, and so many people just sign up but never really use the
service.

~~~
fizx
The numbers you see externally are the same as the ones used internally to
reason about growth, and a great deal of care has been taken to keep them
accurate. Fake accounts are culled, and inactives or likely spammers aren't
counted in the numbers.

~~~
adventured
Fake accounts are culled? Apparently not very well.

To take one simple example, half of Bieber's followers are fake. I'd be
willing to bet that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all followers on public accounts
are fake.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/22104058>

Then on top of this, I'd like to see how many Twitter users post a few Tweets
and then give up. It's not hard to calculate that data just by sampling a
large number of users from the API. I'd argue it's an extreme portion of the
supposedly active user base.

Mostly Twitter is shallow (as in limited use and interaction) consumption
platform, with relatively few highly active producers.

~~~
cantankerous
I think he meant that fake accounts were culled from the count, not in
general.

~~~
ampersandy
Semi-correct. Falsely identifying real users as spammers when computing
metrics isn't a big deal, but it is a big deal if you are suspending accounts.
Twitter does remove spammy accounts, but it's a slippery slope and I'm glad
they remain cautious when it comes to suspending users.

~~~
cantankerous
Makes sense. Thanks for the correction!

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rweba
A lot of skeptics here (as usual!)

Well I use both Google+ and Facebook every day and to me Google+ seems VERY
active with a lot of high quality content as well.

I can't really say if it is more active than Twitter (which is also very
active of course) but it certainly doesn't seem like "a ghost town" as some
people try to claim.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I think Google+ has more active focussed communities of people using it
(photographers, geeks) whereas Twitter has a wider variety of content.

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Felix21
What you mean is: Millions of people activated G+ so they can use Youtube and
other Google services without Google getting in their face every 2 seconds to
activate g+

~~~
edwardunknown
So you're saying they're discovered a way to spend money maintaining a huge
community that nobody actually uses!

Quick, give that CEO another bonus!

~~~
mindcrime
To say that "nobody uses" G+ is ridiculous. I don't even have that many people
in my circles and I see a pretty non-stop stream of activity flowing through.
_Somebody_ is darn sure using it.

Is G+ as active as Twitter? Hell, I don't know, but it's definitely - as
another commenter here just said - not a "ghost town".

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iamwil
This is a bit of a open secret. I think many in tech think Google+ is a ghost
town, and so the joke goes, the only people that use it are Google employees.

However, when I was looking around for 3D printer communities, I was surprised
that there was a vibrant one on G+. While one data point is not evidence, it
is an example that runs counter to the current prevailing tech wisdom that
nothing happens on G+.

I think while G+ may not replace FB, the interface is great, and we may find
social networks have other uses for groups besides what we do on FB.

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w1ntermute
As of late, I've been seeing more and more people active on G+. It's been
quite a surprise, but I think the network is starting to pick up steam.

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mvkel
Define "outpace"

In terms of sharing popularity, printing out a webpage is 100X more popular
than Google+: [http://karmcity.com/post/49275229257/the-value-of-share-
butt...](http://karmcity.com/post/49275229257/the-value-of-share-buttons)

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oneandoneis2
Facebook's where I go for social stuff. Twitter's largely replaced RSS.
Google+ has two uses:

# It's where my Androids upload to

# It's where I get tech news - Linus, Greg KH, O'Reilly, etc. all post on G+

I tend to hope G+ doesn't become as popular as Facebook with the general
public, because right now it's got a really good signal:noise ratio and I'd
hate to see it drown in Farmville updates and cat photos..

~~~
dbrian
Just group people in circles and read the one you want.

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blappu
Why doesn't Google just provide a tool to import a user's full Facebook data
into Google+ with a single click?

They could even do it without the user's consent for people using Chrome or
Android, or they could pay people to do so (it might cost them 10 billions,
but it would be quite a good "company" to "acquire").

Without doing that, or having some killer feature, there's no way that they
will take off.

~~~
ceejayoz
Facebook has a long history of disabling that sort of system.

~~~
blappu
Uh? That's impossible to do.

Facebook already provides a way to download all your data, so Google just
needs to write software that uses it and uploads it into Google+.

Alternatively, they can just automatically scrape the Facebook website via
HTTP directly from the user's machine (using a modified Chrome, modified
Android, desktop tool or Android app).

~~~
NegativeK
Scoble was banned from Facebook because he was scraping contact info. I'm
fairly certain it's a violation of their Terms of Service.

Given that that's unlawful access of a computer system (and kind of a dick
move,) I don't think Google wants to go down that route.

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guylhem
If I was to badmouth Google after reading the article, and especially their
tactic of tying-in the experience, and using youtube and google ranking to
induce people to open and use a google plus account, I'd say they are
leveraging their existing monopolies to acquire another monopoly in a
separated industry.

Naysayers would say that's an emotional response, but I would then let
monopoly be defined by known indexes such as the HI and leave the conclusion
to arithmetic instead of emotions.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herfindahl_index>

I haven't done the calculation, but we may find interesting results - and I
say that while I think google + is being turned into a nice product, with
useless cruft being removed little by little, and some polish added. IMHO only
the legality of their tactic is troubling - the product is becoming good.

But would it have if they hadn't played dirty?

I guess it's legal if you are not getting caught.

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Sarkie
I love it, I use Twitter, I used Facebook. Circles just does it for me.

I care about these people today, I want to follow circle XYZ, I want to share
this to Mates, Nerds, Android, etc.

The Photo Albums is amazing and linked up with Instant Upload from my phone at
full res when charging on a WiFi.

I really like Google+ and wish it had come out before Twitter/Facebook.

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buster
Well, i hope so. I still don't get the value of twitter, it always seemed to
me as overrated. Why 140 characters? External services for photo upload? I
still don't get it..

How is [1] better then [2]?!

[1] <http://www.imagebanana.com/view/okt9mdpq/obamatwitter.png> [2]
<http://www.imagebanana.com/view/ma3vuvby/obamagooglep.png>

I hope i don't start a religious war now, just saying although i have a
twitter account i never really got to use it...

edit: changed screenshots to english versions

~~~
glenra
> I still don't get the value of twitter

"Talk directly to semi-famous people" is one of the chief value propositions.

Suppose you are a fan of some public figure - say, an actor or a politician
who has more than thousands of fan - snd you want to ask that person a
question or give them a compliment.

If they're on twitter, there is a pretty good chance you could get through and
have that person actually _read_ what you have to say. If you're sufficiently
witty and relevant it might even turn into a conversation. There is no other
medium for which your chance of getting through is that large, and part of the
reason _why_ this is true is due to that 140-character limit.

Consider the unread messages in your email inbox. Any single email you open
_might_ turn out to be a quick topical one-liner, carefully edited to make a
single point clearly and say nothing extraneous...but it's much more likely to
be rambling and poorly edited. In the worst case, it could take an hour to
read and understand a single email. So sorting through email (or any other
non-bounded message stream) is daunting and best delegated to somebody else if
you get too much of it.

The fact that tweets have to be so short forces tweeters to think carefully
about what they want to say and to make their point quickly. If the message is
a compliment or comment, it has to be an _efficient_ one. If it's a question,
it's an _efficient_ question - you don't have to skim past a page of
introductions and compliments and caveats to find it. And if the text is ugly
or pointless or hateful, you can "block" the sender after you see a mere 140
characters of what he has to say.

So that's one use case - talking directly to people who otherwise would be
protected by a circle of PR flacks. You can currently do that more effectively
on twitter than most other services.

Even when talking to non-famous people, the 140-character limit imposes
discipline that can make conversations more fun and efficient, but it only
makes sense if some critical mass of the sort of people you like to talk to
and hear from are already on the service, so it might not make sense _for you_
yet. That's essentially a bootstrapping problem.

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badclient
If google+ was doing so well, Google Corp wouldn't be scared shitless to talk
about engagement.

Google+ is honestly more of a rebranding of google than a new service. It is
Google relabeling parts of popular products like Gmail and calling it Google+.

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bigdubs
... that has no active users.

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programminggeek
The only feature of Google+ that is really interesting to me is hangouts. That
is a social thing that I use at work almost every day, but it doesn't really
fit the traditional social network model, and it doesn't help Google make
advertising money.

~~~
mcescalante
Sounds to me like it's a prime candidate for some of Google's famed "spring
cleaning" in the coming years...

~~~
andrewljohnson
That would be fine, and Google should still be lauded. Hangout started a whole
cottage industry, and also nudged existing video chat vendors to adopt Hangout
like functionality. If Google shut down Hangout, I would miss how reliable and
high-quality it is compared to Skype, but there are a couple good alternatives
now.

~~~
lepht
Can you link to a few that you've found useful?

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volta1
Comical headline.

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workbench
not surprising when you converted all YouTubes profiles to G+ Profiles this
month

