Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 112 posts

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#91

Post by nazar »

j45 wrote: post #28
stakecounter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely way more barren on G+ than Facebook, but I think that part of this is because on G+, users are more likely to make posts that can only be seen by a small subset of the total number of users in their circles. On Facebook, most users still make posts visible to everyone on their friends list. I personally have a "close friends" circle of about 15 people and we typically just share content with each othe…

I think you have a really good point about circles being smaller, a side effect of publishing only to certain circles will result in less updates seen, no matter how we try to slice it. I find G+ posts to be generally of much higher quality, especially shared things.

I believe quality of the posts depends on the quality of the people... I had(since I deactivated both Facebook and G+ accounts of mine) nearly the same sets of friends both on Facebook and Google+ the last time I checked them, and the quality of the posts were nearly the same. Actually, most of them were posting the same things to both platforms.

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#92

Post by ward »

mvgoogler wrote: post #78
fl3tch wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what are all the ways in which you find it superior? I agree that circles are better than Facebook friend lists, but G+ seems to lack some features that others find essential on Facebook, like event creation. I've heard a lot of people say that's the biggest reason they have a Facebook account. Also, there's no direct messaging system, at least that I'm aware of. FB messaging has basically replaced email…

I'm on the G+ photos team. Do you have an example of a slow loading image? If you can send me a link I could take a look. Latency is definitely something we care about.

In hopes you'll still see this, is there some sort of obvious Google+/Google Calendar integration in the works? Or just somewhere an official roadmap available for the Google+ development?

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#93

Post by RexRollman »

starnix17 wrote: post #30

Don't forget, if you create a Google account you automatically have a Google+ account. I made a new Gmail account for my mom a few days, now she has a Google+ account too but I doubt she'll ever touch it.

That's lame. People should only have a Google+ account if they actually want it. I personally find this behavior distasteful and Google is obviously using it to artificially inflate their numbers.

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#94

Post by dasil003 »

squiggly101 wrote: post #83
cheald wrote: post #19

All the Google+ hate sort of puzzles me. I absolutely love it. It's become my social media platform of choice, in fact. Maybe it's just that I have enough interesting people to read that it's worth it to me. I'm not sure. I've never been a fan of Facebook. I've had an account for years, but that's pretty much entirely for API testing. I can count the number of things I've posted to Facebook in the past year on one ha…

The problem with Google+ is there are too many people like you there - perhaps which is why you are blind to it. Facebook is full of human beings sharing their lives - Google+ is full of jerks who see Facebook as an API. Friend that? No thanks.

Why are you here?

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#95

Post by dkhenry »

squiggly101 wrote: post #83
cheald wrote: post #19

All the Google+ hate sort of puzzles me. I absolutely love it. It's become my social media platform of choice, in fact. Maybe it's just that I have enough interesting people to read that it's worth it to me. I'm not sure. I've never been a fan of Facebook. I've had an account for years, but that's pretty much entirely for API testing. I can count the number of things I've posted to Facebook in the past year on one ha…

The problem with Google+ is there are too many people like you there - perhaps which is why you are blind to it. Facebook is full of human beings sharing their lives - Google+ is full of jerks who see Facebook as an API. Friend that? No thanks.

I see what you did there. Your assuming people who use G+ are trying to share their lifes with you. They are not. If I want to "share my life" with people. I will call them and drive to their house and spend time with them. That is sharing of life. Posting social gossip on a website is not.

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#96

Post by dkhenry »

I find it funny that people on HN knock Google+ because of the lack of people on it. While at the same time using HN instead of digg or reddit. Why are you drawn to Hacker News over the "big" link sites. Wouldn't by your own logic you use those sites since they have so many more people. Could there be something enticing about a smaller product with higher quality that you find enjoyable. Not to say we should promote group think here as there is place for intelligent dissent, but its very ironic to use one smaller higher quality alternative while vocally rejecting another.

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#97

Post by vidarh »

cytzol wrote: post #53
cheald wrote: post #19

All the Google+ hate sort of puzzles me. I absolutely love it. It's become my social media platform of choice, in fact. Maybe it's just that I have enough interesting people to read that it's worth it to me. I'm not sure. I've never been a fan of Facebook. I've had an account for years, but that's pretty much entirely for API testing. I can count the number of things I've posted to Facebook in the past year on one ha…

> I've never been a fan of Facebook. This is something that's puzzled me . Is it the privacy implications, or just a general dislike for the company? The way I see it, it's a publishing platform for posts shorter than blog entries and longer than tweets. I read things that my friends write, and I write things for them to read. While there are games and pages and things, you don't have to use them. I've had friends sw…

A big part of it is that it is just too much work to clean up what you see to a point where I don't have to wade through massive amounts of pure junk to see anything that's interesting.

No, I don't care what you had for dinner

Meanwhile Google+ makes it exceedingly easy to group people in ways that makes filtering easy, and now with the slider to let you "mix" how much from each circle appears in your full feed, I can pretty close to mute anyone that becomes obnoxious while still just being one click away from still finding out what they had for dinner.

Google+ is already more usable for me than Facebook, and they already have far better tools available to deal with an information overload that doesn't really exist there yet. I'm far more confident that as more people I know starters using Google+, I won't drown in updates I don't care about.

"Updates I don't care about" neatly summarizes why I don't like Facebook much. Maybe 1% of what I see when I log in to Facebook interests me.

I also much prefer the asymmetric relationships of Google+ - it matches the real world far better than Facebook "friends".

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#98

Post by vidarh »

mmahemoff wrote: post #6
brador wrote: post #2

Users? yeah right. More like spammers and bots from the software I've seen on the blackhat forums. Spammers have learnt their lesson and now know age is a factor in deciding if it's a spam account or not and are getting in early and big.

I haven't heard that before. Wouldn't a real user be just as likely to join late (when a service has gone mainstream, bigged up by Oprah etc) as a spam account?

I think the point is to build up a large list of accounts to cycle through that have existed for a while and seen sporadic legitimate looking use, rather than having to use a new account when suddenly starting to churn out spam.

A new account that immediately starts posting a lot is a big red flag. An old, active account that slowly ramps up posting volume is likely a lot harder to distinguish from a "real" user that is getting more active as the service gets bigger.

So you slowly build up a big portfolio of accounts and keep them "warm", and then spread your spamming over a larger volume of accounts instead of trying to create new ones and pump out lots of spam faster than they can block you.

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#99

Post by Raphael »

fl3tch wrote: post #32
_ea1k wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this argument (mostly from Googlers) before. I don't buy it though, as I occasionally (rarely now) see friends post things and get zero comments. The same comments will get tons of comments on Facebook. This thing has largely failed outside of tech circles and twitter style (celebrity) newsfeeds at the moment. Hopefully that will change, as I find it superior to Facebook in virtually every way.

I'm curious, what are all the ways in which you find it superior? I agree that circles are better than Facebook friend lists, but G+ seems to lack some features that others find essential on Facebook, like event creation. I've heard a lot of people say that's the biggest reason they have a Facebook account. Also, there's no direct messaging system, at least that I'm aware of. FB messaging has basically replaced email…

For direct messages, type the recipient's name instead of a circle.

Re: Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day.

#100

Post by darklajid »

cheald wrote: post #19

All the Google+ hate sort of puzzles me. I absolutely love it. It's become my social media platform of choice, in fact. Maybe it's just that I have enough interesting people to read that it's worth it to me. I'm not sure. I've never been a fan of Facebook. I've had an account for years, but that's pretty much entirely for API testing. I can count the number of things I've posted to Facebook in the past year on one ha…

From one 'hater' [1], some (obviously very personal) explanations:

- I dislike 'social networks' in general. They tend to look messy to me, they seem to try too hard to match me with this guy, connect me with that, make me follow one group and post to another. Arguably FB is worse right now, but I see the trend in G+ as well. RSS (and, occasionally Twitter) is good enough for reading for me. Mail and IM (GTalk, ironically) is enough for contacting the people around me.

- Privacy. I do have a Facebook account, mostly to stay in contact with some friends back in Germany. I tried to lock down the account as much as possible regarding privacy settings and my list of friends contains ~40 - well - friends (or family). I don't 'collect' friends and have no 'friends'.

- The combination of my mail(sort of, reduced that a lot already)/contacts/calendar/IM (hi, Android) provider with a 'You need to provide an ID if we feel like it'/'We delete your stuff if we feel like it'/'Pseudonyms are not wanted here' attitude social network seems scary. For one because I don't trust the 'plus' part of Google any single bit by now. And in addition I'd throw a large amount of extra free data about myself at a company that already collects far too much - for no benefit.

- It's full of bull.. Maybe it's me, but I had an account in the past, tried to follow interesting persons and ended up with pseudonym noise (people that were interesting being deleted, everyone discussing about this policy etc) or animated gif images. It was more 4chan than anything else - and I really tried hard to block people after the first 1-2 'offenses'.

- I loved the idea of circles, that is until I started to use them. The metaphor seemed nice at first, but it became frustrating after I moved past the first 20-30 contacts.

1: Actually I tend to reserve the word hate for things that - well - are actually of importance. 'I hate X' where X is a thing or a person I temporarily disagree with seems inflationary use of the term 'hate'.

Post reply on HN