I can remember being initially intrigued when it first came out, but I didn’t have an invite and couldn’t try it out. Then came all the real name crap, and stories of people being locked out of their gmail accounts due to g+ violations, which just made it seem like more trouble than it was worth, especially since I was only using my initials, rather than my full name, for my main gmail account.
I’ve managed to avoid accidentally opting in, despite all the prompts to do so, which for a while seemed pretty insistent, and that further soured me on the whole idea. And now that those sort of shenanigans have died down, I’m told that nobody uses it, so why bother? In fact, I don’t know anybody that actually uses g+ – or at least I don’t know anybody who wants me to know they use it.
Which is kind of a shame, since it seems like they did try to fix many of the issues that have made FB a non-starter for me.
Well, I’m on there! I have a bunch of people on my list, but very few people use it actively… one of my cousins posts pics of her family a lot and we talk on occasion through that, but we also text now and again, too (she’s out west). Everyone else is on Facebook and constantly complains about it, but they also rarely go out of there way to interact elsewhere online. I’m constantly missing shit because it’s all on facebook. There was actually a conversation about office stuff recently, and I missed it because it was on FB…
I think social media might be making us socially lazy!
Even if the figures in the article are accurate, then it really is used by quite a lot of people. It sounds more like one of those stupid “mindshare” problems where people just complain anyway that it’s empty when there are many millions of active users.
I have noticed some degree of Stockholm syndrome where people on the net complain about service X being a virtual monopoly (such as Facebook, eBay, PayPal, etc) which treats their captive customers like dirt. And they have no choices! But when you point out that there are quite a few other services which offer similar things, they shy away from using anybody else.
I’m in two minds about this. I posted heavily on G+ (about once per day) and was very active in comments for around 18 months (2012/13). I found it by far the best social media experience I’ve ever had. I posted my own photos with commentary and my cartoon art. Some of my posts were viewed over 100,000 times. I also posted the same artwork on DeviantArt, but have yet to reach even 100 views of anything I’ve posted there. So in that respect, I really enjoyed and endorsed G+.
The downside was that almost everyone I know in Hong Kong (where I live) is on FB. There’s a small group of G+ users who write in Chinese, but most of the G+ people in Hong Kong/China are expats or locals who are comfortable using English. It’s a bit like Reddit in that sense, with a very strong US user base. Only a handful of my FB contacts used G+.
I also run a business in Hong Kong and have both G+ and FB pages for it. The FB page generates customers. The G+ page is totally useless in Hong Kong.
The other thing to note is that almost everyone who adds me on G+ these days is a spammer. I no longer use G+ except to dip into every now and then. The people I follow post great photos and art so I enjoy browsing sometimes. But I’ve given up on it otherwise.
Some very computer and net savy people have told me they don’t use G+ b/c they just don’t understand it well enough to feel comfortable. And it’s madening how often youu can’t get simple questions about G+ answered, only one of which is: can a person who you just added to a circle see previous posts you made to that circle?
Dear Google, some people want to understand things before they throw themselves in head first!
The real name policy was the dealbreaker for me–not because of privacy, but because I would have to contact Google Support to even get a profile with my real name. My legal surname is a common noun, but sadly not one that is also a common name (like, say, “Smith”)… the one family member I know of with a G+ account had to scan his ID and send it to them before they’d let him activate a profile. If you’re going to put up that kind of a barrier to me using your service, I don’t think it’s much of a surprise when I choose not to use it.
@mikedoeslife This is pretty much my feeling as well.
Also: Near as I can tell G+ hangouts have THE largest concentration of old-school (and 5th Ed.) style D&D enthusiasts in one place on the internet that participate in regular video chat games. Roll20 might get used a lot, but if you’re looking for a casual or long term game to get involved with, you will pretty certainly find one in short order on G+.
Not sure if this is because G+ groups and hangouts are an especially good medium for facilitating such games, or just happenstance that a lot of folks interested happened to start using G+ to organize their games and discussions.
I do notice that, maybe due to the self-filtering nature of setting up G+ circles, a lot of discussions seem to stay more on-topic, with less trolling and sniping than I often see in more public forums or blog discussion threads.
There was an enormous amount of angst internally at Google a few years ago when the execs refused to release uptake data for Plus in its first year of public deployment. Google had traditionally provided usage and a great deal of other enterprise data freely to all staff, a very open company in that way. The decision to hold back Plus data made it clear that the whole thing wasn’t working out at all, though that became obvious from other indications over time.
I bet half of the strongarm stuff was due to the penalties put in place for other products and divisions not toeing the line. Lots of random product managers had to come up with some way to get people into Plus to preserve their income that year.
I’d say it’s a ghost town primarily because Google seemed incredibly intent on filling it with ghosts. The majority of it’s userbase are exactly that. Like Detroit, there’s still plenty of people left to band together and form thriving communities, but it’s not quite the city it might look like from an aeroplane, and there’s a lot of empty structures that don’t host actual people.
I know a lot of people are automatically anti-Google because they don’t want to be tracked, etc, which I understand. However I find that Google provides so much value to me (I’m a heavy user of the entire Google ecosystem) that I am happy to make this trade off. Plus I tend to find that for the most part, Google are much more transparent than others (coughFacebook*cough).
And Google+ was such a superior platform than Facebook that I was more than happy to given them access to this information. Unfortunately without my family and friends being on G+, there was no point in using the service.
Hangouts is great. I’ve ‘fallen back’ from Skype to Hangouts plenty of times when Skype couldn’t handle the poor Internet connection, but Hangouts didn’t miss a beat. (again like G+ vs FB, I’d rather not use Skype at all, and while most friends and family have a Google account, half of them never use it and don’t know their login).
G+ is the only service were 15 minutes a week is adequate to cover all the posts from friends and my interest groups. No pressure to post more than my usual once or twice a year. That, in and of itself, is why its the only social media I use.
“Google+, the social media service for people who hate social media.”
If ~367,000 users posting daily is a ghost town, then Boing Boing’s BBS is what? The old prospector at the edge of town, muttering angrily to himself while he rocks gently back and forth in his chair?
Agreed, and its also nice in that its innovative, as opposed to something that they’re only building to steal traffic from another company. I wish they’d do that more often, rather than just building products for the sole purpose of knocking off the products of other companies.
For example, Google Maps is so good in so many ways, but sucks at being social. There’s still no easy way for me to share a bunch of waypoints through it. Even making a map and sharing it is a bit clunky and hasn’t been improved much since they started the service. If they want to focus on social, try making something new and maybe the masses will follow.
I don’t know if I’m representative, but only about 1 in 10 of my posts are public. This is the huge distinguishing feature of G+, that you have a clear UI showing you exactly who you are sharing with. So of course, I use it, and of course someone looking at public posts will say, “Jeff doesn’t seem to use G+”.
Haters be hatin’, but maybe they should just do it someplace where I don’t have to hear. I’m too busy happily sharing the things I want to share, with the people I want to share them with, on G+.
It’s actually posted on both G+ and Ello, but I prefer the Ello version due to better markup control (MarkDown) and image inclusion. G+ as a blogging platform leaves a lot to be desired in that category.
Mass had something to do with it, though I think it was more than that. The bigger culprit in my view was that Google just stumbled and kept on stumbling out of the gate – #nymwars, Real Names “Identity Platform” (Schmidt’s commentary on that is where I went and nuked my own original real-name account after a few weeks on the site in 2011). An utterly bloated client, the influx of marketing and SEO types (unfortunately a key Google demographic).
There were a bunch of us who remember Usenet and pre-account Slashdot and more. It was a huge disappointment.
Also the contrast of interest graph vs. social graph, which I’m starting to see addressed again. Most of the social competition to FaceBook has foundered, but the interest sites (and direct chat) have done well: Imgur, reddit, Pinterest, Stack Exchange, and the like. Not necessarily huge commercial successes, but a thriving community.
Hi, I’m the data guy / space alien cat. If you’ve got specific questions, shoot 'em at me.
Also to reiterate: if a space alien cat can do this analysis, anyone can. Certainly Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Ello, Imgur. A PFY with a laptop and reasonably good broadband connection. Or advertising and marketing agencies, Or VC and investors. Which raises the question: who’s Google hiding this information from? The public, its users, and quite possibly its own employees come to mind.
I’d like to encourage others to test and verify my results. Grab one or several sitemap files and compare results. Maker data analysis culture represent!
