
New Data: Google+ Public Posts Decrease by 41% Over Past Two Months - zemaj
http://89n.com/blog/manageflitter/google-public-posts-decrease-41-over-past-two-months
======
wccrawford
I used the hell out of it. Every day. And then the Real Name debacle happened.
And I thought, "There's no way Google would screw this up. They'll retract any
day now."

And here we are today. Early this week, I decided that was it. They obviously
aren't going to see sense, and I can't risk losing my account. So I've stopped
posting. I don't even check it, except when someone replies to something I've
already posted.

If it weren't for Real Name, I think it'd be a lot more popular.

Say what you like about Facebook, but if they ban your account, you don't lose
your email, documents, calendar, etc etc etc. You can't say that about Google.

~~~
ericflo
Why does Google requiring a real name bug everyone, but not when Facebook
requires it? I don't understand this outrage at all.

\- Eric Florenzano

~~~
DarkShikari
Because it's in direct conflict with what Google+ was advertised to be.

The core advantage of Google+, as marketed by Google, is to allow you to
separate different parts of your life and keep privacy between them. You can
keep in contact with people from work, from your private life, whatever -- and
keep them all separate. This deals with the primary perceived flaw in
Facebook: hardly any users cared about what _Facebook_ knew about them, but
they were very worried about what _other people_ knew about them.

But often "keeping them separate" means not giving your real name. Artists
using pseudonyms is the most common example, but there's many others: every
day, millions of people take part in communities that they would _not_ want to
say at work that they were part of. Sometimes it's related to sexual
fetishes/kink, unusual hobbies, fandom, or even things like sexual
orientation.

Even with "circles", _if the people in group B know you by the same name as
the people in group A (say, work), you have no privacy at all_. All it takes
is one person from Group B to look up your real name and contact someone, and
the separation is completely broken.

The idea of Google+ was to solve this problem: whether it's to avoid telling
their coworkers about that drunken party last night, to maintain the personal
privacy of a popular artist, or to avoid telling a bigoted boss that they're
homosexual. This is what Google+ was _supposed_ to do. But if people are
required to use real names, _Google+ doesn't actually solve this problem at
all_. It's just Facebook by a different name.

~~~
cageface
Exactly this. Also, because their public rationale for this policy is so
obviously bullshit. If they're willing to lie to me about this, what else are
they willing to do?

------
sssparkkk
Am I the only one who is a bit disappointed with the slow speed of development
of G+? When it launched a lot of users were quick to point out some of the
larger issues they were having, and as of yet not much has been done to fix
them.

Have a look at their what's new page:
[http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&#...](http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=release_notes.cs)
\- mostly rather small tweaks, nothing yet that improves their circles concept
(e.g. allow us to define which circles show up in our default feed).

Also, with regard to their new product 'huddles'; why haven't they integrated
this with google talk? A lot of my friends use google talk, practically none
of them use huddles. So instead of improving the groupchat on google talk (and
maybe just release an iphone app already!) they roll out this new product that
locks out desktop users. Anyone care to explain to me why they might have gone
this route?

~~~
dododo
this! the feature set of g+ is bizarre: huddles? hangouts? no use for it.
games? no use for it; plenty of alternatives. photos? nothing new; plenty of
alternatives. sparks? very low signal to noise ratio, poorly integrated.

circles are nice but limited.

events? where on earth are events? google calendar integration?

is it a social network or a work network? what's the point of g+?

the content of g+ is sparse compared to fb: e.g., friend of friend actions are
private on g+, but visible on fb.

~~~
sixtofour
"sparks? very low signal to noise ratio, poorly integrated."

Poorly thought out, poorly implemented too.

You go to your Stream, and you see the aggregation of all your circles'
streams.

You got to Sparks, and you see ... the same six or eight advertisements for
canned sparks since the day you joined. How useful is that once you've seen it
for three seconds? Yet they spend engineering time and electricity keeping
this non-contribution up.

Wouldn't you expect to see the aggregation of your individual sparks when you
click on Sparks? Of course you would. It's _the same fucking thing_ as your
stream, it's just search instead of posts.

(Yes, I sent feedback on that.)

------
philbarr
Google+ is better than Facebook for lots of reasons except for one important
thing - nobody's on it and they're still using Facebook.

I would much prefer to use Google+, I prefer the interface, I like the Circles
idea - everything sort of feels cleaner. But I can't convince any of my non-
geek friends to join. They just don't see the point.

~~~
wgx
For a lot of my 'non-geek' friends, the years of photos, connections, groups,
etc makes the cost of switching too high.

For many, the idea of getting their photos _out_ of Facebook is simply too
daunting to consider.

They're happy to maintain a LinkedIn though, as that's seen as a 'different
thing': for business.

~~~
wisty
Why do you need to get photos _out_ of Facebook? Can't you just put a link on
your Google+ profile?

~~~
uniclaude
Well, if you have _years of photos_ , it may be an important part of your
internet profile. It can be a way for you to define what you want to have
shown with you on your profile. A simple link couldn't bring this.

------
drats
The fatal mistake was having it invite/beta-only at the beginning. Google has
enough experience scaling now that they shouldn't have needed to do that. I
suspect that they lost a vast number of people with that and thereby a lot of
"test" nesting posts (which would have got everyone feeling that everyone else
is there rather than it being a ghost town).

They probably found the social network analysis from the Gmail sign-ups
(knowing who recommends to who) to be useful. However the difference between
Gmail and Google+ is that Gmail is inter-operable with other networks via a
standard protocol, with social networking that is not the case and they should
have gone for as many sign-ups as possible.

All that said, they have a higher number of people per unit of time signing up
than Facebook did when they started so it will take years for it all to shake
out. Facebook also used exclusive/slow signups, but that was linked to
university prestige/tribalism/rolling fad rather than just an apparently
random process.

~~~
nhebb
My bias is that this had a big impact. A few years ago I might of asked around
for a beta invite for the Next Big Thing, but after the Google Wave debacle
I'm much less interested in being a tech lemming for an uncertain social
networking service. In short: internet burnout.

------
jellicle
Are there any women on G+? Like, any at all?

Ever since Google's decision to roll it out by providing invites exclusively
to old white male technology bloggers, this has been an utterly male-dominated
network. Is there even one soccer mom signed up to G+ in the United States?

Hint to developers: to make a social network, you need men and women to talk
to each other.

(I also agree with the comments about the Real Name policy being very
destructive to usage. Facebook, regardless of what their policies say, has a
HUGE number of people using pseudonyms and very little enforcement against
them. Nor do people have much to lose - okay, their friends list gets chopped
down if their Facebook account gets dropped, but you can rebuild most of that
in an hour. Google seriously threatens a huge chunk of people's lives if they
cancel your account, and having Google executives proudly talking about how
all this data will be really valuable to sell as an identity platform is Not
Helping.)

~~~
rachelbythebay
I think G+ is a stunning example of Conway's Law.

They built a copy of their own organization.

------
mike-cardwell
I stopped converting friends and family when they fucked up the pseudonym
issue. I see no evidence that they're going to do a better job than Facebook
at running a social network. I no longer have any interest in supporting them,
because of this issue. I'll use it if other people start using it, but I'm not
going to push it anymore.

~~~
sixtofour
I spoke positively about G+ when I was first let in. I made an effort to
correct that with everyone I had spoken to.

------
markokocic
Well, the main problem with Google+ is that it is supposed to be social
network, but it isn't.

When were the last time you saw, for example, someones wedding pictures? Or
discussion about real life social events? Or anything social? That's right,
never.

All you can see there is tech blog aggregation, couple of celebrities, some
geek pictures and that's it. You can find more social interaction here on
HackerNews or Reddit.

And then, you just stop sharing yourself and stop checking Google+ and go back
to Facebook for social and other places for geek stuff.

~~~
ktsmith
I see all of those things on Google+ all the time. The thing is they are all
posted to specific circles and not publicly. A 41% drop in public posts is
only somewhat meaningful. Of my family members that post on Google+ most of
them moved from posting publicly to posting privately to specific circles once
they figured out how it worked.

------
citricsquid
g+ was dead the day they released it, I've said in a comment here before and I
stand by it: google cannot launch a successful social product (where
successful means it's a valid competitor to Facebook). They are too big,
people put all their hopes and dreams on specific things happening which are
unrealistic and they prematurely kill the product. Google could make a better
product than Facebook but it would never take off and "beat" Facebook.

~~~
VMG
"told 'ya" (and got downvoted) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2709330>

~~~
morsch
Your comment would have been more interesting if you had explained why.

~~~
VMG
I think the reason is as obvious now as it was back then.

Facebook has the network effect, G+ hasn't.

------
est
So much for Google's grand "identity collector" dream.

~~~
officemonkey
I don't know about that. How many people have "signed up" and are essentially
transmitting their identity to google every time they search?

Even if you never use Google+ anymore, they've still got the browsing habits
of the internet cognoscenti until people stop using their gmail and clear
their cookies.

~~~
Tichy
Didn't that already happen with any other Google service, like GMail or Google
Docs? Log in, Google can track you.

~~~
officemonkey
Yes, but knowing the habits of "somename2000@gmail.com" is a lot less useful
than knowing the habits of "John Doe, Vice President at Acme Computing"

------
OoTheNigerian
The easiest way to accept if this data is accurate is to ask yourself how
often you have used G+ since after it's launch.

The absence of momentum has suprised me. It seems users and developers were
more excited about it. Now, big old FB is picking up momentum again.

They had their chance. It has passed. With lists and subscribe, I wonder what
they will say is the real differentiation is from FB.

------
jigs_up
As a Google Apps user, I'm still pissed that I don't have access.

~~~
revorad
The crappy treatment given to Google Apps users makes me wonder if Google has
some data suggesting that we are less likely to click on ads.

~~~
tonfa
Or that the majority of Apps for your domain users are schools/companies/etc.,
combined with the fact that a social network for those users is harder to
build (they have different requirement).

~~~
revorad
Yeah, companies that are paying customers, not just for the apps but for the
ads themselves! Google should be copying Amazon and learn to care for
customers, but instead they choose to imitate Facebook.

------
nextparadigms
The problem is the majority of people using it now, are people who do _not_
like social networking too much in general. But they were just excited about
it in the beginning because it was made by Google. I am one of them.

But if Google+ wants to succeed they need to get a LOT of mainstream people on
board, and get them _all at once_. They need to make them hear the name
Google+ in all mainstream channels: TV, radio, magazines, from celebrities -
EVERYWHERE. They really need to do a big advertising push, or something to get
the attention of mainstream people. And they need to get a lot at once, so it
doesn't feel deserted for each one of them.

------
mtkd
Still doesn't work for Google Apps users - many of most prolific social
contributors have migrated everything to Apps.

~~~
mmahemoff
Though all of them have a separate Gmail account too.

I'm one of those who has to access G+ in a different browser. As an early
adopter, a big fan of G+, and having a dual monitor setup, I make the effort,
but I can see how it's a turn-off for apps users (especially as they're the
paying customers).

Google's made a big effort to migrate many of its services to support apps
customers and I'm sure they'll do it for Plus too. I'm live streaming the
Salesforce conference right now, where they're touting the "social network for
companies" line. Google is probably thinking about how to make Plus useful in
this context, when they come to support Apps.

------
netrus
The numbers are interesting, but interpreting it is hard. I noticed several
non-tech people getting an G+ account, using it for some days, and leaving,
because hardly anything was happening. That might be bad.

But the graphs mostly documents power users (g+-Twitter syncing), that might
start to share some of there (less article-like) posts just with their
circles, as the personal networks grow stronger and become more useful. That
might be very good for G+.

After all, G+ cannot survive as a blogging platform.

------
aw3c2
This is such an utterly meaningless number. Of course there was a big amount
of public posts when it was fresh. Of course it was a hype. This says nothing
about the long term.

Also why would public posts say much about a social network. I would imagine
that Facebook's percental amount of public posts would go down in comparison
to private posts. Does not mean anything.

~~~
sixtofour
When I used G+ virtually every post I made was public, and most of the ones in
my stream from others were also public. That may not be the majority example,
but I also doubt that it's a small minority.

------
kingkawn
Many of my friends joined, and after an early burst of posting, have stopped
using it entirely. Since everyone is on facebook, and google+ doesn't seem to
offer that much more for the average user, it isn't worth the trouble waiting
for your friends to make the switch.

------
sixtofour
In response to davidw, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2999668>

How I divested from Google services. Others please reply with their own tales.

The first thing to realize is that, like most projects, you don't have to go
from zero to 100% accomplishment in one step. Perfection never ships. My
approach was to use the solutions that would get me off Google as quickly as
possible, and then gradually search for better solutions. But you know what?
None of these things are really that critical.

The second thing to realize is that Google services are really good, and in
some cases you'll have to settle for something that's more than good enough,
but not quite as good as Google. Risk vs reward, as always.

Gmail -> fastmail.fm and Thunderbird as my client (but they have webmail too).
They've been around awhile and they have good credibility. I use their lowest
paid plan, $5/year, so I've set up Thunderbird to download messages
immediately, so as not to bust my storage limit. Their highest plan is
$40/year and 10G storage; cheap and more than good enough. Their spam
protection is OK, not as good as gmail's. In fact I had a minor episode of
false positives, but it cleared up in a day.

Fastmail, if you're listening, I would pursue excellent spam protection
(better than your current good enough performance) as an opportunity to win
gmail (and probably yahoo) expats. The rest of your service is very, very
good.

I have my own domain, and I just point my domain to fastmail now instead of
gmail. Regardless of who provides your mail storage and transfer, I highly
recommend having your own domain, it's cheap. Don't rent your identity from
anyone. G+ may try to tell us that your real name is your most important piece
of identity, but on the net your email address(es) is much more fundamental.

Reader -> Thunderbird. No, it's not in the cloud, but this was the fastest way
to move. It's not my final step, and I'm slowly looking at other cloud
solutions. I could conceivably stay with Tbird though. It's not a great
solution, it was just the quickest to implement. It's rather clunky to add a
feed, but reading is fine, and you can save posts just like email messages, in
the same folders as your messages. That's kind of cool.

Firefox has something called Live Bookmarks IIRC, for feeds. I used it awhile
back and I recall it worked pretty good, certainly better than Thunderbird.

Calendar -> Thunderbird. A little better than RSS above, but it's still not
cloudy, and I haven't bothered trying to sync it with anything, although I
think you can. Again, this was just the quickest way to get off Google in one
swift move. I would like to find a cloudy/better solution.

Address book -> Thunderbird again. Fastmail has an addressbook, I think you
get 400 contacts at my $5/year level. I haven't bothered yet. Besides, I'm
using Tbird as my mail interface anyway.

Docs -> Libre Office, restructured text, my machine, DropBox and email. If you
need realtime collaboration, that's going to be difficult. If you're on G+,
Skud (+K Robert IIRC) has a thread on her efforts to move, and the
alternatives are a couple (one?) good but cost-ish solutions; she opted to
stay with Docs for now, because she collaborates with non-tech volunteers.

Picasa -> pick one. I've never been very social with pictures, email has
always served me more than well enough.

If you think about it, email really is the uber-network. We should be building
social networks on top of email; it's not captive, it's built on RFCs and it
fucking works. I've always thought you could do a lot with imap folders.

Fastmail/Opera, there's an opportunity for you to be "the kid from nowhere ...
Cinderella story." Not that you'd own the network, but you could really gain
users if you led the way into social email.

Blog -> pick one. Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress, roll your own. I've had
Blogger and Posterous, I'd probably go back to Posterous in the near term and
eventually roll my own. Tumblr and Posterous are more than good enough. While
I was still using G+ I read a few positive experiences from non-tech people
migrating from Blogger to Wordpress.

Search -> DuckDuckGo. They're awesome. Their tools are numerous and literally
at your fingertips. They don't track you. Their results pages are uncluttered.
And if you don't see what you like, they have a link to Google search right
there on the results page. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Being tracked by Google -> stay logged out of all Google services. Moving all
your services out is obviously essential. Once you're no longer logging in,
you aren't cookied and tracked, except for your IP when you visit a site that
uses Analytics, but you can't do much about that anyway unless you want to use
noscript(?).

Happy Independence Day.

~~~
lylejohnson
> I use their lowest paid plan, $5/year, so I've set up Thunderbird to
> download messages immediately, so as not to bust my storage limit... I have
> my own domain, and I just point my domain to fastmail now instead of gmail.

The plan descriptions on the fastmail.fm web site make it sound like you have
to sign up for their $40/year "Enhanced" plan before you can use your own
domain. It's still a good deal, obviously, but not as good as $5/year.

~~~
sixtofour
I use my own domain at $5/year. Their description is a little opaque. I think
what they're offering is for them to manage your domain.

I set my mail at my registrar to forward to my fastmail account. I set my
client (Thunderbird) to use fastmail's smtp for outgoing, and to identify me
as me@mydomain.com in the From: and ReplyTo: fields. Exactly what I did with
gmail. Easy Peasy.

------
danmaz74
You may like G+ or not, but these numbers are pretty much meaningless, and the
title completely misleading.

Did they measure a 41% decrease of public posts? No! They measured a drop in
public posts PER USER.

Moreover, this is only measured with users of manageflitter, which can hardly
be considered a representative sample, so, where does all this excitement come
from?

------
LeafStorm
For me, I was using Google+ instead of Facebook for a while. Then I got busy,
and dropped off the radar on both. When I came back, I just used Facebook
instead of G+ because there were still very few of my friends and family
there.

------
hallowtech
I'd be on it if they supported Google apps accounts and not just gmail.

~~~
wccrawford
Maybe they don't support Apps accounts because they know they can't enforce
the Real Name policy on it.

Scenario: George Kibble from ABC Company has an Apps account from his company.
He signs up for Plus, but puts in 'The Duke of Perl' as his 'real name'.
Google cancels his account... Including his email! Now George not only can't
use Plus, but all his correspondance for the company is lost, forever!

It would take only a few of those incidents to start a business riot.

------
michaelochurch
A 41% drop from the "honeymoon" spike is really not that bad. A lot of
companies have seen far worse.

Google+ is a great product, but what I think is happening is that "social" is
starting to play itself out. It's not new and fun anymore. If Google+ puts
forward a mediocre showing, it won't be a result of any failure of the
product, but because it was a late entrant into a game that's winding down.

(I'd like to avoid too much discussion of Real Names. As ill-advised as the RN
policy may be, Facebook has a similar policy. By the way, RN is not about
being "evil". It's about requiring people to use a certain utility _as a
social networking site_ and not as "something else". A Real Names policy sends
the message, "We want these use patterns _only_ ". The problem is that culture
is emergent and "social" can't be enforced from the top down. When you try to
control culture in a heavy-handed manner, you piss people off.)

I remember when I started using Facebook. I thought I was coming in at the
tail end of the thing (October 2004) although, in hindsight, it was just
beginning. The product was buggy and crappy, but it filled a real need on a
college campus (getting in contact with people you met briefly) and it was
fun. The weekend after it came to my college, we had people in the computer
labs at 4:30am using Facebook.

The bureaucratic and cultural nightmare of "Real Names" wasn't an issue on a
college campus, because a non-RN profile wouldn't have been useful in
Facebook's original context. There was no need for a heavy-handed policy, as
non-RN profiles would just be ignored.

"Social" isn't fun anymore. It's not that interesting a space. It's about as
enthralling as an electric bill. Facebook is losing U.S. activity. All of this
certainly isn't Google+'s fault. It's just that people are expecting more (but
the amorphous "more" consisting of people not knowing quite what they want)
from social and no one has figured out how to deliver it.

My best guess is that "social" is going to be dormant and very boring for the
next few years. It won't "end", but it will gradually get blander. None of the
major players (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) are going to die but disruption
and true innovation are going to be scant. Most efforts in "social" will be
about scaling and shaving milliseconds off of latency benchmarks: important
stuff, but very boring from a user's perspective. People aren't going to make
friends they wouldn't otherwise make because a social networking site is 25 ms
faster.

Then, there will be a radical revision of "social". It will be given a new
name, as "social" has been used too much by douchebags. The disruption might
come from a rogue group of "intrapreneurial" innovators within Google+ or
Facebook. Or it might come from one of the lesser (but more interesting and
purposeful) concerns like Meetup. Or, it might come from a startup that
doesn't exist now. But I feel that there will be something exciting in social
mid-decade.

What I think it will look like is a "programmable" ecosystem where people can
develop their own "social" software, without having to learn complicated APIs
and authentication systems. App Stores are a predecessor. Collaborative
project support and multiplayer user-created games are next. Accessible and
cheap "cloud computing" (i.e. relational databases that scale instead of the
unmanageable horror that is sharded MySQL) will come later. My best guess is
that we'll start to see the first innovations in this direction around
2013-14. What's keeping it from happening sooner is not a hard technical
blockage, but a lack of interest from entrenched players. The best way to get
into "social" right now and stand a chance of doing something interesting (not
overnight, but in time) is to build tools that make genuinely interesting
development, with low overhead and an allowance for part-time contribution,
easier.

~~~
Hisoka
A 41% drop is not that bad if you manage to get millions of visitors to a
WebMD type site. It's horrible if you're Google and want to be a major
competitor to Facebook, let's face it, you're supposed to continue growing,
not slowing down growth.

I never really understood anyone that thought Google+ was going to be the next
big social network. It all comes down to dopamine. Google+ fails in supplying
any dopamine rushes. Facebook doesn't fail as much.

~~~
sixtofour
I really wanted them to be. They definitely have enough talent to have been
so. The way they described themselves, they were exactly what I was looking
for. But (my opinion only) they turned out to be full of bullshit and meh.

But the majority of G+ users are probably going to disagree with me. They may
not ever be a serious competitor to Facebook (and who says they need to be?),
but they probably will make a lot of money with it.

