This makes the assumption that these users were using the Reader web interface. I'd bet a good number were using it simply as a sync backend.
How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#12There's an assumption here that doing this would result in a material number of users for Google+. But I'm not sure it would: it's reasonably safe to assume that everyone using Google Reader knows about G+, and is either using it already or has decided to not use it. At best, what's proposed would convert some percentage of that latter group (maybe) over to using G+. It might be a couple million users if everything p…
My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users. Even if only 50% of those migrated over to Google+, if they had found a way to cleanly incorporate RSS feeds into their interface, that's probably a non-trivial amount of users, especially if they are checking multiple times a day, and sharing news/information from their RSS out to readers. It's not just about users, it's also about activi…
6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of millions of users. And 50% is a wildly optimistic percentage for how additional G+ users you'd create.
Let's say they have 12M monthly active users; a large percentage of those are probably already G+ users (let's call it 50%.) A large percentage of the remainder have deliberately decided they don't want to use G+, so you'd be doing pretty damn well to convert 10-20% of them over.
So that's only 600K-1.2M MAU in a "best case" outcome. You're just not going to be able to sell that as being worth allocating a half-dozen engineers to pursue building a new product. It's not even close.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#13If Google had announced the end of reader, but allowed you to integrate the RSS feeds into Google+, all the nerds would have just complained that Google was killing a good product to try and bolster a shitty one (not that I think G+ is shitty). It's always easy after the fact to say that Google could have done this to ease the passing of Reader, but face facts: There's nothing you can do on the internet where people won't complain. Deprecating Reader in favour of g+ would have been a cheap replacement at best, and at worst it could have been viewed as poisoning the water so you'll have to drink Fanta.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#14If they found a good way of incorporating RSS into Google+, that would certainly be an incentive to use Google+; but just adding RSS feeds to a circle in Google+, as this article suggests, would be terrible. Google+ (like Facebook and Twitter) works on a "forget by default" system, where, if you don't consciously make a choice to save an item for reading later, it gets lost off the bottom of the feed. Replacing Googl…
> allows you to specify certain content as content you don't want to miss.
like... circles? and tags?
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#15Reader had ~single digit millions monthly actives, very likely less than ten million (http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have). It's just not that many people (which is why Reader got cancelled after all).
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#16I don't know how well it would have worked for Google (or not), but, personally, I am very, very "+1" on RSS feeds in social network streams as a general concept. No, you don't get the exact same experience that you get with a "conventional" RSS feed reader, but when your news stream can have arbitrary RSS/Atom delivered content, it opens up a lot of options.
This is why I was so happy that we just got RSS feed subscriptions incorporated into Quoddy[1] - our enterprise social network product. So many things that you might be interested in can be syndicated via RSS / Atom - new documents posted to a document management system, new customer records posted to a CRM system, etc. Personally I'm more excited about this feature than almost anything we've done lately.
What will be interesting, will be exploring how to utilize UI elements to give a user the ability to get the "best of both worlds" and view their content in a fashion akin to the way Google Reader (or other readers) work, OR view it "in stream" ala a G+ or Facebook style news stream. When you take a step back and look at it, in many ways, a "wall" or "stream" isn't that different than an "inbox", and one wonders if you can't find a neat way to collapse all of this "stuff" (email, rss feeds, social "status updates", etc.) into one interface.
Anyway, call me bullish on syndication, but I almost feel like we need a song titled You Can't Stop RSS set to the tune of Twisted Sister's You Can't Stop Rock and Roll.[2]
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users. Even if only 50% of those migrated over to Google+, if they had found a way to cleanly incorporate RSS feeds into their interface, that's probably a non-trivial amount of users, especially if they are checking multiple times a day, and sharing news/information from their RSS out to readers. It's not just about users, it's also about activi…
6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of millions of users. And 50% is a wildly optimistic percentage for how additional G+ users you'd create. Let's say they have 12M monthly active users; a large percentage of those are probably already G+ users (let's call it 50%.) A large percentage of the remainder have deliberately decided they don't want to use G+, so you'd be doing pretty damn w…
>6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of millions of users.
In the use case of a type of site where cascading network effects are of paramount importance, 6M engaged users is huge.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users. Even if only 50% of those migrated over to Google+, if they had found a way to cleanly incorporate RSS feeds into their interface, that's probably a non-trivial amount of users, especially if they are checking multiple times a day, and sharing news/information from their RSS out to readers. It's not just about users, it's also about activi…
6M users is just not interesting when you're chasing having hundreds of millions of users. And 50% is a wildly optimistic percentage for how additional G+ users you'd create. Let's say they have 12M monthly active users; a large percentage of those are probably already G+ users (let's call it 50%.) A large percentage of the remainder have deliberately decided they don't want to use G+, so you'd be doing pretty damn w…
The last 6 million maybe nothing, but the first 6 million is huge. So is the 2nd and 3rd.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#19I see the logic, but given recent spying revelations, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to move further away from google and US based services, and certainly not an opportunity to get closer and more integrated. If I had a shred of trust left in both google and the USA's ability to protect and respect my data, I might have tried a G+ RSS solution. Nothing short of massive legislative change in the US would even begin to help me want to use such a service.
All a bit of a shame how this has turned out TBH. Although, the whole thing has caused me to educate myself and seek out alternatives rather then just dumbly sign up for things assuming there was little to be concerned about.
Sadly, just more drip, drip away from the US and towards using things like encryption and doing my own thing.
Come on American, what the hell happened? :(
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#20If they found a good way of incorporating RSS into Google+, that would certainly be an incentive to use Google+; but just adding RSS feeds to a circle in Google+, as this article suggests, would be terrible. Google+ (like Facebook and Twitter) works on a "forget by default" system, where, if you don't consciously make a choice to save an item for reading later, it gets lost off the bottom of the feed. Replacing Googl…
Actually, when I visit various discussion communities on Google Plus, it has a count of the unread posts in the various areas of the community. So they have read tracking in Google Plus, although not in the default display of the main feed. Not sure Google wants people reading outside content anyway, though, compared to interacting inside a locked in Google Plus community. They are pretty anti-standards lately.