I rarely use G+ for the actual plus.google.com site. Instead, I add interesting or helpful people to various circles, and they augment my regular search results. But before you do that you might want to follow these tips for dealing with the random people showing up in your chat contacts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3472283 and flooding your "stream" https://plus.google.com/u/0/115948050407884269063/posts/Nd61...
Google+ grows 43% in June
41–50 of 190 posts
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#42Wow. Lots of impressions here. MySpace is so small now! And shrinking! Let us never forget that history. Tumblr and pinterest are adding a lot fewer users than I thought. Gosh just look at the page. Google+ looks very clean and beautiful compared to Facebook these days. I'm reminded of when everybody used to say "Facebook looks very clean and beautiful compared to MySpace these days". Google has a big leg up here as…
Lots of people link to Google+ posts here. Nobody links to the equivalent Facebook thing, wall posts.
That's a bit misleading, because one of the few places G+ has gotten traction is among developers, mostly in the Google ecosystem (go figure). That's a big and important ecosystem, so it's not shocking that people from there would post stuff that occasionally is of interest to HN.
Facebook wall posts aren't used in the same way by the tech crowd -- probably mostly because they didn't work like blog posts or G+ posts until after G+ launched -- so they don't get HN links. But in other communities people definitely link to wall posts. I work in politics and it's not unusual to see a politico use their Facebook wall as a kind of proto-blog. (Sarah Palin, or some nameless flack on her team at least, is/was a master at this.) It then gets plenty of links from political media.
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#43gmail was already larger than linked in, and google can just flip a switch to "join" gmail users to google plus. How is this metric not BS?
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#44Yes, but I know dozens of people on LinkedIn. I know one active Google+ user and he's a bit of a Google fanboy to begin with. None of the non-techie people I know use Google+ or even mention it at all.
Yes, but I know dozens of people on LinkedIn. I know one active Google+ user and he's a bit of a Google fanboy to begin with. Why is there the need to respond to data with anecdotes? If I give a Google+ growth anecdote, does that invalidate yours? I have no idea why Google+ is being compared to LinkedIn. They have very little overlap. Even among Facebook and Google+ the overlap is limited. Nonetheless Google keeps it…
Because data can also lie. The key here is that the number reported is "unique visitors" – what, exactly, is this telling us?
Not much at all because it says nothing of intent, much less duration of stay on that page or frequency of use.
In the absence of that additional data, anecdotes can be useful to express doubt or confusion about data that seems to not pass the sniff-test. It can be as minimal as "is it just me, or does ... ?" sort of constructions or it can be more formalized to say – "This doesn't fit with my personal observations".
The mistake is thinking that anecdotes add up to data – they don't – but put enough of them together and they can be heuristically valuable – and one on its own, in the absence of other real data, is still a completely valid construct for conversational purposes or to challenge (albeit weakly) some over-cooked claim, like what I'm seeing here, with the google+ traffic data. The refutation of such an anecdotal experience with sound evidence doesn't mean the the anecdote was worthless – hardly. It was valuable because it was provocative.
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#45Sigh. We're drawing conclusions from Compete again? I've said this before and I'll say it again; using Compete for quantitative traffic comparisons is flawed, particularly with social sites that utilize embeddable content. Their data has been proven wrong countless times. Until recently, Compete claimed Reddit ( http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/ ) had less traffic than Digg ( http://siteanalytics.compete.c…
Agreed.
According to one of Google's own services, google+ is pretty much dead:
http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=google+plus&graph=wee...
compare with fb:
http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=facebook&graph=weekly...
edit: thank you downvoters for illustrating the bias on HN. A fake stats piece promoting google as #1 on the frontpage? This place is turning into /. but with more google employees. I'm out.
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The irony is that most people use Facebook (and LinkedIn) as glorified publicly-facing email accounts with automatic reply-to-all and attachments set to auto-open and display in-line. The only thing added is a rudimentary voting system.
I use Facebook to share and chat about photos. I use LinkedIn for recruiting. I use neither as "publicly facing email accounts". At some level, any application can be described as "forms with some text inputs and some submit buttons".
publicly facing email accounts
I believe the argument was that posting a picture is analogous to emailing that picture to your friends, and commenting on that picture is the same as hitting "reply to all" on that email. It's the same behavior, presented in a different format.
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#47Wow. Lots of impressions here. MySpace is so small now! And shrinking! Let us never forget that history. Tumblr and pinterest are adding a lot fewer users than I thought. Gosh just look at the page. Google+ looks very clean and beautiful compared to Facebook these days. I'm reminded of when everybody used to say "Facebook looks very clean and beautiful compared to MySpace these days". Google has a big leg up here as…
First, the OA's comparison is meaningless.
It focuses on vanity metrics rather than engagement or retention. A lot is written on that topic, so I won't repeat (see Tim Ferris: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/05/19/vanity-metri...). This article is excellent optimization for link baiting.
And it doesn't matter because most of these sites don't compete against each other. Each of these media sites has a different value prop, target demo and potential ARPU. For example, the value of a unique visitor on LinkedIn is way higher than on Tumblr, but it's a moot point because they aren't going after the same users (sure there will be some overlap, but that's in the same way that I visit HN and FB).
Second, these stats are utterly wrong.
Tumblr had 133M global uniques in that time, according to quantcast [1]. Pinterest had 45.8M US uniques around then [2]. And this completely ignores their quickly growing mobile traffic. Quantcast directly measures traffic by pixeling sites, so I trust their data over Compete in this case.
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded. Compete's numbers are just made up. I know for sure they are off by more than an order of magnitude for reddit (or at least were a year ago).
Most of the traffic tracking on the web involves plugins (generally in the form of a toolbar). I don't know about you guys, but I haven't had a 3rd party toolbar in my browser interface in a long time. Compete, Alexa, etc. they're all tracking people who don't understand technology.
I generally agree with your sentiment, but let's not get carried away: using 3rd party toolbars does not automatically render you unaware of technology.
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#49How does he define a 'visit'?
It's a vague concept now - from an ISP perspective hitting a page with G+ (or T or FB) button on it when signed-in takes down a 'visit' sized payload.
When I +1 a page using Chrome Extension - is that a visit?
Same with mobile apps - what's a mobile 'visit' - an API GET?
Re: Google+ grows 43% in June
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think G+ is going to worm its way in by offering add-ons that actually draw people in. The two major examples for me are Hangouts and the fact that G+ posts from 'important' people appear in Google News rollups about a particular story. Hangouts are really the only reason I've ever seen a non-techie use G+, and they work really well. People seem to try Skype and then realize that there are weird rules about having…
I'm also seeing more google results to G+ pages instead of the wikipedia page when searching for names, famous people, topics, places and so on. Coincidence?
If not coincidence, an anti-trust suit waiting to happen...