It's not just the number of users. It's that people who were heavy Reader users are particularly valuable nodes in a network like Google+. They are more likely to draw other people to Google+ than the average user since they curate more content than the average user.
How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#22I 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…
Wasn't the Reader announcement before the NSA scandal though? It seems that most people who would make the switch would have done so before that came out.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
Yeah, but you're assuming they'd be engaged. If they don't like G+ and they're just using it as a news reader, that's pretty much the opposite of engaged, from a social network perspective.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#24Reader 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).
That link has a response saying:
I asked this question at the German Google Developer Day 2010 and a Google Engineer / PM who works on Buzz said it's "tens of millions active monthly users".
Nothing on that page has anything stating "single digit millions monthly".
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#25Reader 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).
> very likely less than ten million (http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have).
How did you get 'likely less than ten million' out of a Quora comment saying 'tens of millions'?
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#26There'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…
> My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users.
My understanding is that the better figures are closer to twice that: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns#fn5 (and that Reader users were very active).
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#27Many users would have seen that as another instance of google trying to shove google+ down their thoats.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#28This is a good idea. However, one thing I have learned from unsuccessfully pitching good ideas to very successful people/businesses is that the more successful they are, the less their decisions will make sense to outside observers. This is largely because their resources allow them to have different motivations for doing or not doing things than virtually anyone else.
Telling a wealthy person that you can make them alot of money, or in this case, telling a business that has hundreds of millions of users how to save a few million of them, isn't necessarily compelling to them. A company like Google has the luxury of deciding that a few million users aren't worth keeping for whatever reason, even though dismissing that number of users for any reason sounds absurd to most of us.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#29Another way to get millions of google+ users, stop plastering ads for it all over Google properties and instead make it useful.
No I don't want to use + on Youtube, no I don't want my search Google+ enabled. On the average week I probably get 5 or 6 requests to do something related to Google+. Worst of all most of the requests are modal dialogues that interrupt the flow of what I wanted to do.
Re: How Google have lost opportunity to get millions of Google+ users
#30If 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…
In Twitter, you can make it send you a text message whenever specific users post.