Google+ Is Outpacing 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.

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+.

I signed up for Twitter around January and frankly speaking, couldn't find my way around. I've heard people speak of retweets, DMs, hash tags and variety of other terminology and didn't seem to find an explanation of what they all meant or did after I signed up. In fact, I really didn't know what to do and just logged off and didn't bother with Twitter again until a couple of months later when I thought of trying to find and meet up with other coders in my city and thought perhaps Twitter might be a way useful way to accomplish that task.

I found if I search for #[MyCity], there were a bunch of tweets with #[MyCity] so made a tweet along the lines of "Any coders in #[MyCity]? Let's meet."

8 hours later, I search #[MyCity] and my tweet wasn't even in the list. I asked on /r/Twitter and was told tweets from new accounts don't make it in the search results as to suppress spam. As a guy who doesn't know anyone on Twitter and who nobody knows on Twitter I feel like the service simply is unusable. The impression I'm left with is that Twitter is only useful for "brands". As a regular schmo who isn't a "brand", I don't see the point of using Twitter and thus my account is inactive.