I don’t even believe that laying the groundwork was very relevant to their growth, but even if it was a large factor, there are presumably other factors that come into play as well, like the critical mass already acquired by Facebook.
I plucked this out of your jumbled post and put it at the top here because as far as I’m concerned it’s the first time you finally at least somewhat properly acknowledged my analogy to some extent. At least in some way that can be understood by me.
You say you do not “even believe that laying the groundwork was very relevant to their growth”, yet you’ve offered very little basis for this opinion in past posts. And, sorry, bumbling earlier about different choices in weekly restaurants doesn’t cut it, nor make much sense.
You then go on to say that even if was a large factor that didn’t matter because there were “other” factors into play as well. In other words, even if I’m right about one factor, I’m wrong because there’s other factors, but the only one you bring up is a “critical mass” theory. So, let’s look at this “critical mass” theory…
When you said, “the critical mass already acquired by Facebook”… you’re obviously implying that Facebook sucked up all the users. If that was the case, then how do you explain Twitter’s meteoric rise and continued rise after Facebook? If there was some sort of near impenetrable “critical mass”, Twitter would have flopped… but, it didn’t.
The Twitter social network offered something compelling while the Google Plus social network did not and the Google Plus problems had very little to do with any “critical mass” caused by Facebook. If the Twitter social network was able to overcome it, then Google Plus damn well should have also overcame it during the time period in which it started when mobile, social users were exploding. Instead, they exploded on Facebook and Twitter and left Google Plus in the dust for the most part.
Also, how does this downplay in any shape or form the groundwork that was laid for Google Plus that I’ve mentioned? It doesn’t.
My point is that the actual business concept you are referring to MAY NOT WORK HERE. That is not moving the goalposts, it is saying you are wrong.
I’ll try to explain this to you again. You never addressed the actual business concept I was referring to in the first place (until your last post, see above). You misconstrued my concept as something different by comparing it to choices of weekly restaurants and then attacked it from there without addressing the actual concept.
And, to be honest, you still haven’t properly addressed it AFAIC.
Beyond that, your insistence that because Facebook laid the groundwork for the business type they should have hit 100 millions users much more than 7 or 8 times faster than Facebook did seems bizarre.
Um, what? Case and point.
Yes, that does seem incredibly “bizarre” since I never said that. At all. I think I’m going to go with my initial assumption earlier in this thread that you’re confused.
I’m having a hell of time following your train of thought. You’re veering wildly all over the place and attributing things to me I’ve never said and analogies I’ve never made, only to finally come around and then state vague opinions that my analogies are “wrong” without properly backing it up.
And, yes, saying that their growth was truly glacial means it should have been much, much faster.
Er, what? I don’t think it should have been “much, much faster”. Focusing on the word “glacial” out of context in this manner means very little.
My point in context was that the growth was incredibly slower than Google says because they are lying about their user base. Once you factor in valid externalities, one can see that Google’s real user base is vastly inflated with people who don’t really even actively use the specific service. It’s about the engagement (among many other factors I’ve mentioned throughout this thread).
Please note the word “true” was bolded in the original, I didn’t add that emphasis.
Duly noted. I bolded the word “true”. What’s your point with that? Sigh…
To the extent that Google fabricated user numbers (a point not included in the post I responded to that you excoriated me for not noticing) their growth was bogus.
You just made no sense there.
If the fake numbers multiplied their accounts by 10 then that makes their growth look a lot slower (though it also moves the 100 million user mark, we can’t just multiply how long it took by 10). If they inflated their user numbers by 100 times then, sure, it looks like their uptake was pathetic, but I don’t think it’s anything like that.
You just made no sense there in relation to anything I’m saying. Was that just stream of consciousness or something?
You assume that it is up to you to define the argument. You made a post, I argued with you. I wasn’t arguing about whether this or that analogy is a good one that illustrates your point,.
Well, back to reality. What happened is I made a point and used an analogy. You obviously didn’t either understand the analogy or who knows what and went off into left field.
I was arguing that your insistence that Google+ had glacial growth was silly
You were? It was honestly hard to tell because only until your last post have you bothered to make a coherent argument about it by making the wrong claim that Facebook has reach some sort of “critical mass” and therefore there was no room for Google Plus. Which wouldn’t account for Twitter, of course.
Then again, that’s bizarre, because if that was the case that would account for Google Plus having glacial growth, but you now say that was “silly”.
I’m going to go with you’re confused again.
I don’t know to what extent that was and though I suspect it was probably very significant it is impossible to say (how can we tell someone who got rolled in with their YouTube account and wanted to be from someone who didn’t).
Ok, I think I can grasp a jumbled point of some kind you’re attempting to make. You’re saying say we can’t tell how badly Google pads its numbers. Well, I agree we can’t get exact numbers, but…
We can use deduction to get a good idea:
(Also please see the above chart that also happens to blow your “glacial growth was silly” theory completely out of the water.)
While Google will lie about its user base, many of their Google Plus third party “partners” will not cover for them. For example, Zynga began offering its games “CityVille” and “Zynga Poker” to people who use Google Plus. Compared to its success at Facebook, Zynga said that the user uptick was very slow. Engagement was horrible. That’s the true sign of people that have been signed into Google Plus, but don’t really use it nor want it.
Intel made the some complaints that engagement is very low from Google Plus “users” as well for their branding. Meanwhile, Facebook engagement was huge for them. The same has been said by Pinterest as well where they said Google+ doesn’t have the same degree of vibrancy that Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest itself has and complained of horrible engagement.
So… just where are these millions and millions of active users Google claims to have???
They are not really there for the most part.
Long before the mandatory roll in of YouTube users, etc., there was a very aggressive opt-in campaign to sign people into Google Plus whenever they signed into their YouTube accounts and elsewhere within the Google ecosystem.
Anyone who wanted to use Google Plus would have very likely done so at this time while there was a glaring banner at the top of their Youtube account, etc. that kept coming up like a pain in the ass.
Also, (this is very important) anyone who wanted to use Google Plus would have engaged with Google Plus, but Google Plus true engagement was terrible.
This opt-in effort failed and it failed miserably unless one looks at Google’s fake numbers (more on this below).
If this opt-in effort would have been a success, Google could have kept Google Plus as an opt-in service and bragged about all the people who had chosen to join Google Plus instead of fudging numbers and misconstruing passive sign ins to other services as real engagement with Google Plus.
Obviously, this didn’t work and didn’t get the response that Google wanted and therefore they decided to simply force users of their various services into Google Plus.
YouTube alone gets about 1 billion unique visitors per month. That’s not a typo. 1 billion. You’d think with those kind of numbers, there’d be a lot of engagement with Google Plus after Google ramrodded all those Youtube users into its service, but there wasn’t. Why? Because most YouTube users didn’t want Google Plus, that’s why. If they did, they would have engaged with it in vast numbers after being railroaded into it.
Google then disingenuously bragged about user growth without mentioning the fact that they tried opt-in and it failed. They disingenuously bragged about user numbers without mentioning how most users they jammed into the service weren’t really engaging with it.
Google has a sordid history of padding its numbers this way. For example, Google has been caught counting people who merely sign into Gmail to check their email as Google+ interactions/traffic/engagement. That’s bullshit.
When Facebook says it has over 800 million active users, it usually means most people came into Facebook and used the service in some way in a given month. They logged in and somehow actively used their Facebook accounts. This is often the same for Twitter as well.
When Google talks about Google Plus usage, it’s most often someone who logged in and then visited one of the myriad of Google properties. That’s not using Google Plus just because they stuck a Google Plus icon somewhere on the page.
So, look at where we are today after all the Google bullshit dust has settled. The glacial growth that was attempted to be hidden with all these bullshit, inflated “users” has come home to roost.
As Ars Technica has analyzed after it was announced that Vic Gundotra was “departing”:
“The social network hasn’t gained the massive userbase it would need to rival Facebook, and the aggressive integration strategy has been universally hated by users. … few things the company has done have been more disliked than Google+. … Google+'s YouTube takeover was seen as “a rocky move” even inside the company.”
Google Plus true adoption has been glacial in relation to their dishonest approach to user numbers. Maybe if Google had been honest about its true user base and had shown its real numbers over time without unethically jamming everyone into it and disingenuously trying to mask that as engagement, Google Plus would be, ironically, in a better place today.
But, they didn’t and it isn’t.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree
That’s the second time you’ve sworn off this saying it is pointless. Is the third time the charm?
At this point, I really hope so.
