Live data from Hacker News

Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

investor.google.com

51–60 of 66 posts

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#52
post #50

The number of users doesn't mean much, everyone is invited now.

Unless you're under 18. And the high school demographic seems like it would be pretty relevant.

The fact that high-schoolers couldn't join Facebook for years didn't seem to hurt it too much.

Edit: downvoted?

To quote Wikipedia:

The Web site's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site's terms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#55
post #36

How do they define 'user', for Google+? Facebook's metric is 'active users' which I believe are people who have visited the site during the past 30 days. If Google+'s definition of 'user' is simply someone who has registered for a Google+ profile, then they are overcounting enormously. My feeling is that they are indeed disingenuously overcounting, in the same way they do with Android, where they talk about the numbe…

In the case of android, Google doesn't even have relationships with every carrier that sells android phones so 'activations' are the only metric that would actually cover everything.

why do you think that they are not using a 30-day active definition of user?

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#56
post #14

Something like 20 million of their users are in India, a lot of those look like Orkut (Google) converts (edit: maybe notsomuch, add FB and look at last few years). http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=google%20plus%2Cork...

Search doesn't correlate to usage. I don't search for Facebook, but use it a lot.

a lot of people search for facebook. search is just faster than navigating or bookmarks a lot of the time.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#58

Just a datapoint, but out of all the invitations I sent out when G+ first launched (100-150, I don't recall), 40 or 50 friends signed up. ~3 of them still use it at least once a week. From my observations, G+ still seems to consist primarily of three major user groups: 1. Tech celebrities 2. Technologists in general 3. Non-US users Facebook's feature set is killer, but at some point, I really would like to use some s…

How do you know if they are using it? Maybe you're not in often used circles of a lot of the people you invited.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#59
post #36

How do they define 'user', for Google+? Facebook's metric is 'active users' which I believe are people who have visited the site during the past 30 days. If Google+'s definition of 'user' is simply someone who has registered for a Google+ profile, then they are overcounting enormously. My feeling is that they are indeed disingenuously overcounting, in the same way they do with Android, where they talk about the numbe…

In the case of android, Google doesn't even have relationships with every carrier that sells android phones so 'activations' are the only metric that would actually cover everything. why do you think that they are not using a 30-day active definition of user?

Because I know a lot of people who use Facebook, and next to none of those use Google+ (even though many registered in the beginning). This is the same for many people I know. So I'm taking a guess.

As far as I can tell the only people using Google+ are tech people.

Re: Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million users

#60
post #9
post #6

"Cash – As of September 30, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $42.6 billion." During this quarter, Google made $302 million on interest alone. That's an impressive 11% of this quarter's net profit. I wonder what they plan to do with all that money.

Buy patents apparently :-) More seriously, I asked once about this when they were removing bottled water from the local mini-kitchens and dropping over 1 billion dollars a quarter into the bank. My question was "Gee, can't you spare a couple of million this quarter to keep the bottled water restocked?" and obviously the answer was that they could not. But from a corporate/strategic point of view having a lot of cash…

Bottled water is a scam. Most of the stuff comes from water hoses. I'm sure the stuff they had at google was laced with tasty minerals and went through purification processes. There is so much plastic that ends up in the ocean/street because of bottled water. Its really a shame.
Post reply on HN