Google+ has a very low engagement, even looking at Neilsen's 2012 data. I stopped using it a long ago, with the exception of the alerts I get on gmail which is probably the number google is using.
I feel they should have stayed exclusive far longer, but that opportunity is long gone now.
Engagement is different than active users. I can click the red button on my gmail account once a month and be considered active. Engagement is how much time I spend on the site. I'm on HN everyday commenting and reading. That's engagement, but I'm never on G+
Sounds like classic extrapolating from personal use to me. "I'm never on G+" doesn't have anything to do with how many engaged, active users they have, and they have a lot.
I wonder how they calculate active uses. I check Google+ maybe once a month...am I counted in there?
I wish these statistics were reported in user-hours/month or some other unit that provided real information. I suspect this wouldn't look good for Google though.
Which would be great if checking a feed meant more than logging into your gmail. Also it would be super if it were still 2006 and the only way to sign up was a .edu account. Since it's 2012 and most of the activity is driven by Gmail I'd say it's a glacial pace.
When your marketing tools are the frontdoor of the internet as well as everyone's INBOX, and you're outdone by 11 guys with an iPhone only photosharing app, you know you're doing something wrong.
It's a service so bad you can't even be forced to use it. It's as pathetic as MSN.com not being the front page of the internet despite 90% of computers defaulting to it.
I guess. I check it every day. It's true that G+ is driven more by "interest communities" than by "friends and family links". Most of my activity there is reading and occasionally commenting on the posts of people more famous than I. So I think it's fair to say it hasn't achieved Facebook's level of success. Nor, perhaps, will it any time soon.
But again, I check it every day, which is the same thing I do with Facebook. If you want my eyeballs for an ad, either platform provides the same value. I'm probably not typical, but I'm not completely weird either.
I think you can only look at G+ as a success at this point. Just not a success on the scale of Google Search or Facebook.
Most people I see on G+ when I approach them and ask in person did not even know they had a G+ account... but guess what, they did have a Google Account for Youtube and Gmail.
You can see more and more G+ integration into Youtube, why not just turn Youtube into G+ altogether?
'It's true that G+ is driven more by "interest communities" than by "friends and family links".'
And that is one of the main reasons I prefer G+ over Facebook. Facebook is nice to keep in touch with ones family and friends (old and new), but G+ is where I can follow (and occasionally interact with) a number of luminaries, visionaries and tech leaders. God forbid my family and friends fill up my G+ stream!
If G+ never catches up with Facebook in terms of numbers, I'll be the happier for it.
Success being quite relative. I was forced to sign up to both Gmail and G+, because that's what my employer requires, and I wanted the job.
I access Gmail exclusively through my Windows Phone. I don't use G+ at all. The community of interest thing doesn't hold much water for me, because I've yet to be pointed at something of interest on G+ that I wouldn't find elsewhere.
Not saying that my particular scenario reflects everyone else's, but it does seem to work for me and my friends, most of whom have GMail accounts as their primary mail address.
If success is defined in terms of ad impressions then that won't work with me either. I use an ad blocker.
I don't get why Google + goes after Facebook, when it is sooo much better positioned to go after LinkedIn. Most of what Google + does well is what LinkedIn needs to do better. If Google+ allowed people to upload resumes, they would dominate. Think about the value of a Google search friendly resume, coupled with a community graph.
> Which would be great if checking a feed meant more than logging into your gmail.
If you read the actual announcement it would be clear that when they say "stream-actives", they are not including people logging into Gmail.
"Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever. More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1'ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search...), and 135 million are active in just the stream."
No offense, but that's a dumb measure of activity. None of those things actually requires engaging. I can +1 an app that I used once or do a google hangout because it's more convenient than skype. That doesn't mean I use google+. The activity feed part of the site is mainly crickets.
I think you missed my point, which was that the Wired article is citing the number from the second half of that sentence: "and 135 million are active in just the stream." (not the first number, which includes people who just +1'd an app)
I don't think the statement in the blog post could be much clearer, you just have to read the whole sentence :)
Google PR: "Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month."
Facebook PR: "Oct 4, 2012 - More than one billion people are active on Facebook."
These are "reports" based on PR-based spin and "rounding up." That's all. If you were a manager at one of these companies, wouldn't you sell the same schtick?
If you +1 things and use hangouts, 'using Google+' is exactly what you are doing...
You might only be at the bottom rung of MAU's with a tiny level of engagement, which if common would be easily identifiable by looking at other metrics. So it's possible they are purposely deceiving us with misleading metrics - but you are indeed a G+ user. Albeit, not a very valuable one.
I am not in doubt about these statistics, but the perceived reality is far from what Google is trying to suggest. From my personal experience G+ is still a ghost town (as far as seeing activity from my friends).
My own experience is the same. Our facebook page has over 2000 likes, our twitter feed has about 360 followers, but we only have 19 people following us on google+ (even though we've been on there for a year, post all the same things on google+ and promote our g+ page as much if not more than the others).
On a personal note none of my friends uses google+ (only my wife). They pretty much all use facebook.
I think the general consensus I'm getting is that Google+ isn't necessarily a place for you to connect with your friends. I use it primarily to connect with people I don't know that share common interests. I suspect many others do the same.
I can understand some people being fatigued from companies defining their own metrics to justify success. In some cases, its comical.
Google is more susceptible than many to this reaction because of their industry position, and their attempts to reign users of traditionally heterogeneous apps into a more monolithic service. We'll see this again when they finally bring Youtube into G+.
Google has historically used relatively loose metrics to declare Google+ a success, as well as pushed usage of Google+ in controversial ways, and that has made people cynical.
That's an interesting question. Obviously human beings are more than capable of splitting up into tribes of haters, even in cases such as social media where one can, at no real cost, participate in them all.
But, while generally there's less "holy war" drama of this type on HN than you might find on a generic tech news site, on the topic of Google Plus succeeding there seems to be more.
My personal (and not particularly charitable) assumption is that in addition to the people who'd normally relish a dispute of this type, there's also a subset of people on HN who feel on some level that their experience as early/heavy Facebook adopters will give them some sort of "leg up" in understanding or creating the future, and if something competes with Facebook, it threatens their "insight".
This particular theory aside, it does seem mysterious to me.
I hate the incantation of "You mad, bro" so incredibly much, but then again, I'm also tired of people who still don't get it. "There's no one on it". Yeah, and if you open a Twitter account and don't follow anyone then it looks like there's no one on it.
Personally, I think Google should just "declare victory" and move to other more important things. They certainly do have have the people for that (the important things), but I feel they're wasting a huge amount of resources on this without much gain (if any).
I actually suspect I'll eventually end up being counted in those statistics, because I'll break and "upgrade" to join some Coursera/Udacity hangout. It will still be the only way I'll use it, but the stats will look great, I'm sure.
It wasn't a good idea to just copy-paste a newsfeed on top of your gmail contacts. Also trying to be everything all at once is usually a bad choice. It might fare better if it had been more private or work-oriented, something like a yammer on top of gmail. Right now the product is unfocused and confusing at best.
Ridiculous to compare usage numbers between the two considering Facebook at that point (e.g. when they were at 100mil users) had no dominant products that its users were using every day. In other words when Facebook users went to Facebook, they really meant to.
With G+, the monthly stats are meaningless since they're probably representative of Gmail logins who accidentally click on +.
Doubt it, thats easily traceable if that were the case. More than likely its due to things like Google Play and Android devices outpacing iOS devices. Plus a little Facebook kickback sprinkled in due to recent privacy and advertising changes.
Which means... unique user page views with 0 engagement metrics! Yay~
MAU and DAU are meaningless statistics. It's pure eye-views, that's all.
Show me some average aggregate visits per user per month, and I'll believe there's actually something happening (ie. the average number of times each unique user visited the site in a single month. Hint: for Facebook, this number is probably ~20-30).
I went to G+ last week because Google requires it for the "Author" feature in search engine results (pure vanity, my blog posts will never show up in SERP). I went to G+ for thirty seconds this week to read the post about the guy who "cracked" a really lame DRM scheme. I don't consider myself an active G+ user at all, and yet I'm sure those "actions" (adding a URL to my profile and viewing a post) contributed to the 135 million, and I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one. Engagement across G+ per unique monthly visitor is almost certainly an order of magnitude smaller (by time on site, for example) than Facebook's.
> Those are people who really meant to go to plus.google.com
I actually did that at least a couple of times last month by mistake, the G+ link is very close to the Inbox/Home link in GMail's web app. I cursed and hit the back button in a matter of seconds each and every time.
I pop into Google+ occasionally, but I usually regret it. They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit.
At my undergrad school we had some preacher who used to hang out at a certain spot in the middle of campus and yell at passing students to tell them what sinners they are. Google+'s "what's hot and popular" often feels like the Internet's version of that spot, except it's for those whose religion is based on smartphones.
I definitely agree about the interface. Google+ has a beautiful interface for viewing these types of posts. Facebook's interface seems to be a little too optimized for viewing George Takei posts for my taste.
> just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck
Two anecdotes still don't make a a solid point, but this is what made me exclude "popular postings" from my feed.
Twitter, which has a similar focus on following celebrities instead of people you know, suffers from the same problem...the top tweets on (German) Twitter sound terribly typical of things that Twitter users would say. I think networks should curate these "highlights" a lot more wisely.
> They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit.
At least for me, these posts have gradually changed into embarassing images with trifles about friendship and love, as well as images with pseudoscientific and borderline superstitious claims about health etc. This "facebookification" has lead me to believe that Google+ is now really taking off. Honestly I'd rather have the kneejerk tech rants back.
> The only problem with g+ is that none of my friends use it.
At one point in time, you and everybody else had the same problem in Facebook, yet everybody still switched.
Sometimes, if you really want something but social inertia is against you, you have to be a trendmaker/leader and force your friends to follow you against their will. Make yourself rare, and if you're valuable enough in your circle, they will follow you. If they dont, it only means that using Facebook is more valuable for them than keeping in touch with you.
Thats how Facebook won. All the cool and rich and influential ivy league kids got there first, and the sheep had no choice but to follow. Do you remember arguments like "Why should I use FB? None of my friends are there?" from the early era where every early adopter's friends were somewhere else?
If your _only_ argument for one network and against another is where your "friends" already are, this means only that you are one of the following-only sheep without any social influence whatsoever, and will simply use whatever you're socially pressured into. With enough FB data about you, it would probably be possible to tell whom Google would have to make to switch to G+ first, so that you as the weaker link have no other choice than to follow.
> if you really want something but social inertia is against you, you have to be a trendmaker/leader and force your friends to follow you against their will.
Honest question, why would anyone "want" to move from FB into G+ so much so as to be a "leader" and having to convince his/her friends into following? This pretty much sounds like a cult.
Make that "comparison graphs". Show how many people use FB email, how many people use FB as a Web search engine, how many people use FB to edit office documents, how many people use the browser created by FB ; ) , etc.
Google+ seems to be, albeit slowly, achieving escape velocity. My G+ feed is definitely getting more and more interesting and I begin to see non-techies post there (people who previously only used FB).
135 millions active users vs 1 billion is not something to dismiss, especially seen the rest of their entire stack.
A community event organized by the city, with speakers from the local police department, "helpfully" hosted by Google, who then, without asking or even telling the organizers and promoters, append some self-serving bullshit attendance requirements:
"According to the RSVP page for the event, admission to the bicycle theft event is guaranteed only if community members include a link to their Google Plus Local profile with five or more reviews."
and:
'None of the San Francisco city officials who organized the event, it seems, knew about the marketing language Google inserted on the RSVP page.
"You know you try and do something good, you try and do something for the community and something like this happens," Officer Carlos Manfredi, an SFPD spokesperson told The Appeal in apparent frustration.'
The SFPD believed the workshop was open to members of the community, and everyone in the community was able to attend. "That's what the flyer said," Manfredi said."
These are meaningless numbers, for reasons already given in this thread, but Google+ is a good product. In fact, I remember in June 2011 how, after it launched, there was a lot of press about how great it was. That applause was well-earned, in my opinion. The engineers who built it did a very good job, and the problems that Google+ has faced have been strategic in nature.
On the other hand, Google+ needed, strategically, to get real use, and so far it hasn't been seeing much of that. Hangouts are useful, but the idea that people would use them as Google intended (as a "cool" emergent social behavior rather than something people would only do with people they know well) was hopeless without a context (such as a board game, a great tool for overcoming the initial social awkwardness that is common among interesting people) that could encourage the "hanging out". Without such a context squarely in the center, people won't use hangouts for more free-form purposes than "regular old" video chat. It's an admirable vision, though.
This is why, in my short time at Google, I was obsessed with raising the issue of game quality, even though I was nowhere near that team (there was zero G+ activity in New York). I realized that Games had the potential to be a critical battle for the product's ability to establish itself and get users comfortable with product. With social network fatigue in an advanced state ca. 2011, the only thing that could get people in a new general-purpose social network for long enough to get comfortable with the thing was high-quality games (not Zynga shit). Google blew it on that one, resulting in a missed opportunity that can be measured in the tens to hundreds of millions, and possibly billions.
Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos). It was that, and the fact that, when the shit hit the fan, I did some white-hat trolling and outed unethical management (eng-misc) instead of just taking it.
If people at Google still know of you I strongly suspect it is because they have read one of your posts here. No offense intended, but this is far from the first time I have read a post by you detailing how you were kicked out of Google for what you claim to be speaking truth to power. It detracts from the very valid points you made earlier in your post.
I wasn't kicked out. I wasn't fired. However, it's true that Google will make your life more difficult if you speak up about something that actually matters. People have been placed on PIPs for Real Names advocacy.
This is exactly the conversation I didn't want to have- it isn't relevant to the original topic. That's what I meant when I said that it detracts from the point you made in your main post.
Hangouts are the killer app of Google+. You're right that the "emergent" part doesn't really work well.
It's a really useful tool that works much better than skyping. I've had heaps friends join Google+ purely to be part of a video chat session we have to catchup.
But there really is a heap of potential here. I'm part of a language-learning study Google+ group that hosts weekly chat sessions. Unfortunately for us, the room is limited to 10 people (and two spots are taken up by the moderators), so most people would miss out.
I wish the group was able to create as many hangout sessions as needed, place a single moderator + native speakers into each session. Would be a seriously killer app among language-learners...
Maybe I should have a look at the API or something :P
Very much so. My brother and I live in different countries in Europe and the other day, we were able to have a video conversation (through a Google Hangout) with both our phones over cellular network (I was taking a walk in a park).
I'm a tech person but even I was floored this was even possible.
> Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people
> still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes
> from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and
> drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary
> to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos).
It is unlikely that the Google engineers present during your employment will ever forget you. Indeed, the story of Michael Church continues to echo throughout mailing lists across all of engineering.
However, I doubt this is only because you irritated senior executives by sending them rambling manifestos about the inherent superiority of your self-designed card game. Although that may have been the origin of your legend, it was not truly cemented until you cross-posted them to a company-wide mailing list and then engaged in a flamewar against all comers.
After your resignation, some of us compared notes on who had received the most disproportionate response to criticism. I was sure that being called a child molester in reply to pointing out your lack of credible accomplishment would win me first, but sadly I did not even place in the top three.
The tale of Michael Church resonates throughout the entire valley. It certainly isn't limited to Google. I wish a Googler on his way out would leak the threads, honestly; I want to see if they live up to the tales.
Context, for the uninitiated (grab a beer before searching): "site:news.ycombinator.com michaelochurch google"
"Speaking personally, on every day that I'm blocked, I add college traditions that never existed, transpose digits of population figures or world records, and create articles on bullshit "folklore" that is often absurd; this is what Wikipedia will have to put up with if I am to be blocked from it. About 1 in 3 of my vandalisms survives for a year, and several have been reproduced on other articles."
You do realize that (a) most of those "sockpuppet" accounts are nonexistent (0 contributions) and (b) User:Isomorphic was kicked out of school for being caught drunk with his 15-year-old girlfriend, right?
If not, then you don't know what you're talking about.
I've learned quite a bit about the michaelochurch argument technique from this thread:
Step 1: Make up stories about your enemy that nobody on the forum can verify. (Be it that your manager is a terrorist or that the Wikipedia admin who banned you is a child rapist.)
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Post again with an even more grandiose tale.
Why are you wasting your time on HN when you could be writing screenplays instead?
I have no idea whether "User: Isomorphic" was a child rapist. He got in trouble for her being intoxicated, and for supplying alcohol to a minor, and so there were a lot of suspicions, but I don't know what was proven and, quite honestly, I don't want to even think about that. I prefer not to think about the sorts of people who do that stuff.
The "terrorist" thing is getting taken way out of its original context. I was not comparing Google's problem executives to terrorists. I was saying that they enjoy destruction and take inspiration from it. I could have replaced "terrorist attacks" with "gruesome accidents". They're saboteurs, not terrorists.
I was an intern during this bullshit. To anyone not "in the know" on this: there's nothing to know. There was a big pointless flame war on an internal listserv at Google over some objections that Michael had to how Google runs certain things. Googlers disagreed. I'll say that I disagreed with Michael, but the people on the other side are almost as responsible for letting themselves be sucked into such a stupid flame war.
There is nothing interesting here. This is a Google soap opera. The rest of HN can comfortably go on with their lives without worrying.
I think this sort of thing repeats itself because Michael consistently blames Google for his departure, and has a tendency to show up "when summoned" (i.e, when Google is ever mentioned on Hacker News). If I worked somewhere and an ex-employee shit all over my employer at every opportunity, I'd be a little rankled as well. It's demoralizing! If he told a significant audience things that sound plausible but aren't remotely true -- an accusation leveled by several Googlers in the past -- I'd have to fight the urge not to respond.
It'd be one thing if he never spoke about Google again and people still gave him shit for it, but Michael likes to sneak in bits about his drama into comments that have nothing to do with his drama, as he has done here. I've half suspected for months that Michael is, as he even says here, just trolling Google employees into responding.
Either way, the entire thing just reflects negatively upon him. That's the sort of thing that follows you in a career, and I'd hate to have the tide of a bunch of people turned against me because I made an ass out of myself on a Google mailing list. If I were doing due diligence on hiring him, the Hacker News threads would give me serious pause.
I've read HN comments in the past wherein the point has been made that it reflects negatively on both sides, and I can't see that, particularly hearing the story from Xooglers that I know.
Actually, I've been misunderstood. It's not Google that I tear to pieces at every opportunity, but the comically awful managers who watch terrorist attacks on TV and then think, "I'd like to do that to a company!" If Google cleaned house, it could be a great company and a cultural leader again.
There are a lot of things I admire about Google, and I think highly of most of the engineers. 95% of the engineers I met there I would gladly work with again.
In fact, I would recommend most people I know, if they get a Google offer, to take it. I would give them the gory details so they are prepared for what may happen, but if you join Google and end up on a good project that gives you visibility, it's a great place to work. Sure, there are unethical managers, but they aren't all bad. Why shouldn't they give the place a try?
The whistleblowing that I engaged in was in response to (a) incidents of management doing things it knew were counterproductive, to costs in the millions of dollars, just to keep rank, and (b) upper management refusing to discipline people for doing things that were immensely unethical.
What's amazing to me is that people will go to the mat to defend a huge company, when what they're actually doing is defending its rather abysmal management, which wouldn't do a thing for them.
Let me say it like this: Google is a fine company in most ways. It has built some excellent products, and the internal engineering tools are great. There's an incredible amount of talent. However, becoming an Argentina for disgraced technical managers who think constructs like "calibration scores" are a good idea is not a good business move.
If anyone is a friend of Google, it's me, because I've drawn light upon the managerial bloodsuckers that have been working to destroy the place.
That was an aggressive dysphemism and perhaps I should retract it. They're more like black-hat trolls than terrorists. They push bad ideas into implementation for amusement, but not out of hatred or coercive intent.
Yes, I do believe that "calibration scores" were injected into Google out of a malicious schadenfreude. These people were not trying to do good for their company. They were trying to hurt Google for their own amusement.
When a company has a reputation of a cultural leader as Google did throughout the 2000s, there are people out there who want nothing more than to "hack" it and make it destroy itself.
Despite claiming that it has a "peer review" performance system, Google has secret "calibration scores" which are set unilaterally by the manager and regularly destroy people's careers. (That they exist is not secret, but the specific numbers given are hidden.) There's a known problem with managers using low scores (but positive verbal reviews) to keep their reports captive but unable to transfer. I managed to find mine out, and it was substantially below the (completely respectable) 3.4 that I was promised, but that's another story.
Whoever came up with that idea (a parallel performance review that can silently ruin your career) was either deeply stupid or thoroughly evil. Google claims to hire only smart people, which leaves... evil.
A decent company will know that this is an opportunity for corruption and take performance reviews out of the transfer packet.
Here I was thinking that there's no way anyone would call anyone else a child molester on a mailing list, and then you go ahead and liken managers to terrorists. Suddenly his story has more credibility.
I don't remember that comment, and I don't have access to that thread anymore.
You make one point: the people who destroyed Google's culture are not terrorists. That was a clumsy metaphor. Rather, they're saboteurs who are destroying the company for their own amusement, as I clarified in my comment below.
You missed this gem: "becoming an Argentina for disgraced technical managers" which I suppose implies that Google's evil managers are like hunted Nazi war criminals, and Google is shielding them from international justice (their war crime being orchestrating "calibration scores").
Facts have value irregardless of whom communicates them.
For opinions on the other hand reputation matters a lot. You can't seriously give credibility to somebody with an obvious ax to grind, with an agenda and with a certain history. Even if that opinion seems valid, you may just be suffering from confirmation bias and at the very least you should seek out that confirmation from people you can trust.
I don't think you can trust any of the vocal Googlers who come out on these threads. Nor do I think they should be considered representative of Google. There are a lot of good people at Google-- probably most of them-- but they aren't especially active on Google-centric threads. What you get on these are people who see any acknowledgment of Google's imperfections as a personal attack on them.
There's a lot of good, and there's some bad, to Google. Whenever I post honestly about the place, there are 3 or 4 people who consistently come out for a fight. I don't mind that they exist and do what they do, because it's free entertainment for me, but regarding "people you can trust"... anyone who trusts them over me is too stupid to live. Trust me or trust none of us.
I am not claiming to be unbiased, and my experience at Google is rather limited. (I was there in what I've been told were the worst 6 months for the company's culture.) However, I learned an incredible amount in that time (more than most people learn in 10 years) about what happens to make good companies go bad.
It's amazing to me how, if I write a post that's 90% pro-Google and 10% critical, people who I have never met come out of the woodwork to get their flamewar on. I think they enjoy it. I don't. I'm over that stuff and I find it tedious.
I make "dozens of comments" because people I've never met come out of the woodwork to disparage me and they honestly have no idea what the fuck they are talking about.
Saboteur is a better metaphor for the execs who came up with this shit than terrorist. They are maliciously destroying a company for amusement, but they're doing it from the inside. It's sabotage, not terrorism.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing the people who came up with the calibration-score and transfer-block nonsense at Google getting "a boot in [their] ass, it's the American way". Anyone who thinks it's morally acceptable to make political-success reviews part of the transfer packet deserves no less.
for reasons already given in this thread, but Google+ is a good product
It is. The only thing missing is the hordes of people I could connect to. It's a lonely place to hang out at Google+ and I check my streams less often than I would want to.
The best thing is that they might just be able to keep it in life-support for ages because it's hooked to other Google services. What that means, effectively, is waiting for Facebook to make a major screw up and drive a hefty flock of users to the next popular alternative—Google+.
I'd really like to know exactly how much time the average user spends on G+ per month in comparison to Facebook. The only reason I ever go on it is to see what Linus has posted.
Facebook has a significant fraction of the world Internet population (about 41%). Google has far less (about 6%?). Growing as fast as Facebook is great (better than growing more slowly) but the marginal effort to acquire a user is much higher for Facebook than for Google. You can't compare the growth rate of Google+ to Facebook any more than you can compare Google's growth rate to Bing.
Lots of g+ is hidden of course because people don't post everything publicly. I like g+ much better than facebook and wish my non geeky friends and family would come over to it.
Firstly, I HATE that UI. It's slow, clunky and cluttered. Secondly, you have deliberately some of the most popular people on Google+. In particular Guy Kawasaki. It's not representative of a typical user.
I have my feed open a lot, but not because I'm reading it. It's because I opened the tab, clicked "Start a Hangout", and that Hangout window opened in a new window. The feed window is now hidden by the Hangout window, so the analytics might be skewed.
Here's what Google should have done instead of Google+. (As for the OP, Google+ is a ghost town. It doesn't matter much how often people pass through and see the tumbleweed blowing around if they're not staying and contributing.)
First, they should not make people register for Google+. They shouldn't even call it Google+. It should just be a feature added to gmail: pages. You create gmail pages and you manage access to gmail pages. Access is not granted to other "Google+" accounts (there's no such thing), but to any set of email contacts. Access may also be made public, in which case a gmail page acts as a lightweight blog post (though you might require login to comment).
That's it. Rather than sending a friend an invitation to Google+, you'd send a link to an interesting gmail page. If it's access controlled (not public), then when they click to retrieve it, if they don't have the cookie yet, they'd need to check their email and click the Google just sent.
In many respects, it should function just like Google+ does now. Pages would have posts, pictures, comments, live chats, hang-outs, games, whatever. And once you're on a gmail page, you could browse up to the author's profile page and see whatever other pages they'd made visible to you. The major difference is that you could send content to anyone without the stupid "are you on Google+?" conversation that has to happen first now and thus can build pages without worrying too much about whether the ghost town will become a popular tourist destination.
I think this responds to Facebook's continuous decline in service. They have messed up the algorithms so bad that News Feeds tend to be more static than ever before, back in the good days, people checked Facebook a hundred times a day because there was something new all the time. Today, if you check your Facebook 5 times during the day and you will probably get the same news as before.
They also pissed all their page owners off with Edge Rank, which was rolled out too aggressively for my taste. Since not every facebook page owner is a facebook or SMM genius, a lot of small pages lost a lot of engagement, which turns into less engagement on the site overall (from users and page admins).
I started using G+ a couple of months ago because of their Hangouts, but am gradually becoming more engaged on the site.
Facebook will fall, and pretty soon I think. Too much spam, horrible filters and crappy customization on your share settings make it a shitty service now. As G+ emphasizes share settings control, I can see why it will take over pretty fast, they just need to gain a little more momentum.
Plus, the only ads that seem to work for advertisers on Facebook are scams.
All the other revenue is coming from companies who aren't measuring. But soon, they'll realize what a waste it is, and once they pull out CPC is going to dive. And if Facebook decides to artificially inflate CPC, fewer people who aren't running scams won't pay.
The only reason I created an account was because they kept spamming me with "People you may know," and the only way to opt out of the spam was to... create a Google+ account.
The only reason I created an account was because when following a link to an article on G+ it always asked for personal info, and cancelling that logged me out of Google Apps.
Seems like they have a lot of different ways of persuading us to sign up!
I wonder how many of those are, like me, people who accidentally switch to Google+ while trying to tap the tiny links atop other Google properties on their mobile phones.
For me, the thing keeping me off of Google+ is that it's linked to my other accounts. Violations (or even suspected violations) of copyright and a long list of other things could get the entire account in trouble. I say this as someone who has received copyright notices on content I produced entirely on my own.
I would never want to jeopardize my Gmail or Adsense. It's much better to get my social fix from any other company.
And it's not just about email either. I also use my Google Drive account. I also have a couple of purchases on Google Play. I had photos in Picasa at some point too.
Google blocking your account means you lose access to all of this. Which is why using Blogger or Google+ is a liability.
I feel this way too. I have a laptop I keep my gmail logged into, I don't want that tied into my android phone via google play. Google+ is just one more privacy intrusion.
I see a lot of bashing in this thread, but those numbers might actually be true, because of the explosion of Android on mobile phones. There's high probability that lots of activity comes from mobile users.
Interesting metric would be the number of people who posted at least one content item every month for past quarter. Here the content item = status/+1/like/comment/photo/URL.
Write metric is more robust than read metric, especially against users who are simply using FB or G just to login into other sites or apps.
Nothing quite underscores Google's desperation like the "you can't view Google+ content if you're a logged-out Google user"-trick they pull. What the hell is the deal with that? Are the little check marks they can put in the Active Users column really worth the bad experience they are giving those same users who just wanted to read the post?
Sure, it's a little niggle, nothing worth complaining about. The grating thing is that they went out of their way to create a roadblock, even casting aside the pretension that logged-out means something.
If someone posts a URL to a G+ post, you can most certainly view it without being logged-in. (Try it: go to your G+ stream, and then for a post, select "Link to this post" on the drop-down menu, then past that into a Incognito window --- you'll be able to view the post.) You can also view a user's G+ profile, and view all of their public posts, without being logged in.
Yes, you won't be able to create a stream and follow a set of users without creating a G+ account --- but without a G+ account, there's no place to actually store the set of users / G+ pages / G+ communities that you're interested in....
It's strange that I hear that from a lot of G+ users. I personally find that when I try to visit even links from HN pointing toward G+ posts, I am forced (well, prompted) to log in. For that reason alone I've never actually seen a post on google plus.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadI wish these statistics were reported in user-hours/month or some other unit that provided real information. I suspect this wouldn't look good for Google though.
When your marketing tools are the frontdoor of the internet as well as everyone's INBOX, and you're outdone by 11 guys with an iPhone only photosharing app, you know you're doing something wrong.
It's a service so bad you can't even be forced to use it. It's as pathetic as MSN.com not being the front page of the internet despite 90% of computers defaulting to it.
But again, I check it every day, which is the same thing I do with Facebook. If you want my eyeballs for an ad, either platform provides the same value. I'm probably not typical, but I'm not completely weird either.
I think you can only look at G+ as a success at this point. Just not a success on the scale of Google Search or Facebook.
You can see more and more G+ integration into Youtube, why not just turn Youtube into G+ altogether?
And that is one of the main reasons I prefer G+ over Facebook. Facebook is nice to keep in touch with ones family and friends (old and new), but G+ is where I can follow (and occasionally interact with) a number of luminaries, visionaries and tech leaders. God forbid my family and friends fill up my G+ stream!
If G+ never catches up with Facebook in terms of numbers, I'll be the happier for it.
I access Gmail exclusively through my Windows Phone. I don't use G+ at all. The community of interest thing doesn't hold much water for me, because I've yet to be pointed at something of interest on G+ that I wouldn't find elsewhere.
Not saying that my particular scenario reflects everyone else's, but it does seem to work for me and my friends, most of whom have GMail accounts as their primary mail address.
If success is defined in terms of ad impressions then that won't work with me either. I use an ad blocker.
If you read the actual announcement it would be clear that when they say "stream-actives", they are not including people logging into Gmail.
"Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever. More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1'ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search...), and 135 million are active in just the stream."
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-communities-an... (which is linked from the Wired article)
I don't think the statement in the blog post could be much clearer, you just have to read the whole sentence :)
Facebook PR: "Oct 4, 2012 - More than one billion people are active on Facebook."
These are "reports" based on PR-based spin and "rounding up." That's all. If you were a manager at one of these companies, wouldn't you sell the same schtick?
You might only be at the bottom rung of MAU's with a tiny level of engagement, which if common would be easily identifiable by looking at other metrics. So it's possible they are purposely deceiving us with misleading metrics - but you are indeed a G+ user. Albeit, not a very valuable one.
On a personal note none of my friends uses google+ (only my wife). They pretty much all use facebook.
Sources:
http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statist...
http://www.quora.com/Email-Service-Providers/What-is-the-bre...
Google is more susceptible than many to this reaction because of their industry position, and their attempts to reign users of traditionally heterogeneous apps into a more monolithic service. We'll see this again when they finally bring Youtube into G+.
But, while generally there's less "holy war" drama of this type on HN than you might find on a generic tech news site, on the topic of Google Plus succeeding there seems to be more.
My personal (and not particularly charitable) assumption is that in addition to the people who'd normally relish a dispute of this type, there's also a subset of people on HN who feel on some level that their experience as early/heavy Facebook adopters will give them some sort of "leg up" in understanding or creating the future, and if something competes with Facebook, it threatens their "insight".
This particular theory aside, it does seem mysterious to me.
If growth is proportional to the number of users (exponential growth) that would lead to more than tripling in size each year.
If growth is linear, it is still easily more than doubling each year.
What growth rate were you expecting in order to be faster than "glacial."
With G+, the monthly stats are meaningless since they're probably representative of Gmail logins who accidentally click on +.
And what, we guess that Google is using the Facebook definition? https://www.facebook.com/help/219375581424410/
Which means... unique user page views with 0 engagement metrics! Yay~
MAU and DAU are meaningless statistics. It's pure eye-views, that's all.
Show me some average aggregate visits per user per month, and I'll believe there's actually something happening (ie. the average number of times each unique user visited the site in a single month. Hint: for Facebook, this number is probably ~20-30).
I actually did that at least a couple of times last month by mistake, the G+ link is very close to the Inbox/Home link in GMail's web app. I cursed and hit the back button in a matter of seconds each and every time.
Would be interesting to know how much people have accidentally done the same.
At my undergrad school we had some preacher who used to hang out at a certain spot in the middle of campus and yell at passing students to tell them what sinners they are. Google+'s "what's hot and popular" often feels like the Internet's version of that spot, except it's for those whose religion is based on smartphones.
I definitely agree about the interface. Google+ has a beautiful interface for viewing these types of posts. Facebook's interface seems to be a little too optimized for viewing George Takei posts for my taste.
Two anecdotes still don't make a a solid point, but this is what made me exclude "popular postings" from my feed.
Twitter, which has a similar focus on following celebrities instead of people you know, suffers from the same problem...the top tweets on (German) Twitter sound terribly typical of things that Twitter users would say. I think networks should curate these "highlights" a lot more wisely.
At least for me, these posts have gradually changed into embarassing images with trifles about friendship and love, as well as images with pseudoscientific and borderline superstitious claims about health etc. This "facebookification" has lead me to believe that Google+ is now really taking off. Honestly I'd rather have the kneejerk tech rants back.
At one point in time, you and everybody else had the same problem in Facebook, yet everybody still switched.
Sometimes, if you really want something but social inertia is against you, you have to be a trendmaker/leader and force your friends to follow you against their will. Make yourself rare, and if you're valuable enough in your circle, they will follow you. If they dont, it only means that using Facebook is more valuable for them than keeping in touch with you.
Thats how Facebook won. All the cool and rich and influential ivy league kids got there first, and the sheep had no choice but to follow. Do you remember arguments like "Why should I use FB? None of my friends are there?" from the early era where every early adopter's friends were somewhere else?
If your _only_ argument for one network and against another is where your "friends" already are, this means only that you are one of the following-only sheep without any social influence whatsoever, and will simply use whatever you're socially pressured into. With enough FB data about you, it would probably be possible to tell whom Google would have to make to switch to G+ first, so that you as the weaker link have no other choice than to follow.
Honest question, why would anyone "want" to move from FB into G+ so much so as to be a "leader" and having to convince his/her friends into following? This pretty much sounds like a cult.
Google+ seems to be, albeit slowly, achieving escape velocity. My G+ feed is definitely getting more and more interesting and I begin to see non-techies post there (people who previously only used FB).
135 millions active users vs 1 billion is not something to dismiss, especially seen the rest of their entire stack.
A community event organized by the city, with speakers from the local police department, "helpfully" hosted by Google, who then, without asking or even telling the organizers and promoters, append some self-serving bullshit attendance requirements:
"According to the RSVP page for the event, admission to the bicycle theft event is guaranteed only if community members include a link to their Google Plus Local profile with five or more reviews."
and:
'None of the San Francisco city officials who organized the event, it seems, knew about the marketing language Google inserted on the RSVP page.
"You know you try and do something good, you try and do something for the community and something like this happens," Officer Carlos Manfredi, an SFPD spokesperson told The Appeal in apparent frustration.'
The SFPD believed the workshop was open to members of the community, and everyone in the community was able to attend. "That's what the flyer said," Manfredi said."
Stay classy Google...
On the other hand, Google+ needed, strategically, to get real use, and so far it hasn't been seeing much of that. Hangouts are useful, but the idea that people would use them as Google intended (as a "cool" emergent social behavior rather than something people would only do with people they know well) was hopeless without a context (such as a board game, a great tool for overcoming the initial social awkwardness that is common among interesting people) that could encourage the "hanging out". Without such a context squarely in the center, people won't use hangouts for more free-form purposes than "regular old" video chat. It's an admirable vision, though.
This is why, in my short time at Google, I was obsessed with raising the issue of game quality, even though I was nowhere near that team (there was zero G+ activity in New York). I realized that Games had the potential to be a critical battle for the product's ability to establish itself and get users comfortable with product. With social network fatigue in an advanced state ca. 2011, the only thing that could get people in a new general-purpose social network for long enough to get comfortable with the thing was high-quality games (not Zynga shit). Google blew it on that one, resulting in a missed opportunity that can be measured in the tens to hundreds of millions, and possibly billions.
Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos). It was that, and the fact that, when the shit hit the fan, I did some white-hat trolling and outed unethical management (eng-misc) instead of just taking it.
It's a really useful tool that works much better than skyping. I've had heaps friends join Google+ purely to be part of a video chat session we have to catchup.
But there really is a heap of potential here. I'm part of a language-learning study Google+ group that hosts weekly chat sessions. Unfortunately for us, the room is limited to 10 people (and two spots are taken up by the moderators), so most people would miss out.
I wish the group was able to create as many hangout sessions as needed, place a single moderator + native speakers into each session. Would be a seriously killer app among language-learners...
Maybe I should have a look at the API or something :P
Very much so. My brother and I live in different countries in Europe and the other day, we were able to have a video conversation (through a Google Hangout) with both our phones over cellular network (I was taking a walk in a park).
I'm a tech person but even I was floored this was even possible.
However, I doubt this is only because you irritated senior executives by sending them rambling manifestos about the inherent superiority of your self-designed card game. Although that may have been the origin of your legend, it was not truly cemented until you cross-posted them to a company-wide mailing list and then engaged in a flamewar against all comers.
After your resignation, some of us compared notes on who had received the most disproportionate response to criticism. I was sure that being called a child molester in reply to pointing out your lack of credible accomplishment would win me first, but sadly I did not even place in the top three.
Context, for the uninitiated (grab a beer before searching): "site:news.ycombinator.com michaelochurch google"
"Speaking personally, on every day that I'm blocked, I add college traditions that never existed, transpose digits of population figures or world records, and create articles on bullshit "folklore" that is often absurd; this is what Wikipedia will have to put up with if I am to be blocked from it. About 1 in 3 of my vandalisms survives for a year, and several have been reproduced on other articles."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mike_Church http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_so...
etc. It's a gift that keeps on giving.
If not, then you don't know what you're talking about.
Step 1: Make up stories about your enemy that nobody on the forum can verify. (Be it that your manager is a terrorist or that the Wikipedia admin who banned you is a child rapist.)
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Post again with an even more grandiose tale.
Why are you wasting your time on HN when you could be writing screenplays instead?
The "terrorist" thing is getting taken way out of its original context. I was not comparing Google's problem executives to terrorists. I was saying that they enjoy destruction and take inspiration from it. I could have replaced "terrorist attacks" with "gruesome accidents". They're saboteurs, not terrorists.
I was an intern during this bullshit. To anyone not "in the know" on this: there's nothing to know. There was a big pointless flame war on an internal listserv at Google over some objections that Michael had to how Google runs certain things. Googlers disagreed. I'll say that I disagreed with Michael, but the people on the other side are almost as responsible for letting themselves be sucked into such a stupid flame war.
There is nothing interesting here. This is a Google soap opera. The rest of HN can comfortably go on with their lives without worrying.
It'd be one thing if he never spoke about Google again and people still gave him shit for it, but Michael likes to sneak in bits about his drama into comments that have nothing to do with his drama, as he has done here. I've half suspected for months that Michael is, as he even says here, just trolling Google employees into responding.
Either way, the entire thing just reflects negatively upon him. That's the sort of thing that follows you in a career, and I'd hate to have the tide of a bunch of people turned against me because I made an ass out of myself on a Google mailing list. If I were doing due diligence on hiring him, the Hacker News threads would give me serious pause.
I've read HN comments in the past wherein the point has been made that it reflects negatively on both sides, and I can't see that, particularly hearing the story from Xooglers that I know.
There are a lot of things I admire about Google, and I think highly of most of the engineers. 95% of the engineers I met there I would gladly work with again.
In fact, I would recommend most people I know, if they get a Google offer, to take it. I would give them the gory details so they are prepared for what may happen, but if you join Google and end up on a good project that gives you visibility, it's a great place to work. Sure, there are unethical managers, but they aren't all bad. Why shouldn't they give the place a try?
The whistleblowing that I engaged in was in response to (a) incidents of management doing things it knew were counterproductive, to costs in the millions of dollars, just to keep rank, and (b) upper management refusing to discipline people for doing things that were immensely unethical.
What's amazing to me is that people will go to the mat to defend a huge company, when what they're actually doing is defending its rather abysmal management, which wouldn't do a thing for them.
Let me say it like this: Google is a fine company in most ways. It has built some excellent products, and the internal engineering tools are great. There's an incredible amount of talent. However, becoming an Argentina for disgraced technical managers who think constructs like "calibration scores" are a good idea is not a good business move.
If anyone is a friend of Google, it's me, because I've drawn light upon the managerial bloodsuckers that have been working to destroy the place.
Sigh. Adding inflammatory rhetoric like this really doesn't help in painting you as a reliable commenter, either.
Yes, I do believe that "calibration scores" were injected into Google out of a malicious schadenfreude. These people were not trying to do good for their company. They were trying to hurt Google for their own amusement.
When a company has a reputation of a cultural leader as Google did throughout the 2000s, there are people out there who want nothing more than to "hack" it and make it destroy itself.
I didn't know which side of this argument to give credence to, but that quote just helped me make up my mind.
What's that mean? They'll fly planes in to buildings? Strap bombs to themselves and blow up their buses?
> I would give them the gory details so they are prepared for what may happen
It sounds like you discovered office politics. It doesn't sound particularly unique to Google.
Despite claiming that it has a "peer review" performance system, Google has secret "calibration scores" which are set unilaterally by the manager and regularly destroy people's careers. (That they exist is not secret, but the specific numbers given are hidden.) There's a known problem with managers using low scores (but positive verbal reviews) to keep their reports captive but unable to transfer. I managed to find mine out, and it was substantially below the (completely respectable) 3.4 that I was promised, but that's another story.
Whoever came up with that idea (a parallel performance review that can silently ruin your career) was either deeply stupid or thoroughly evil. Google claims to hire only smart people, which leaves... evil.
A decent company will know that this is an opportunity for corruption and take performance reviews out of the transfer packet.
You make one point: the people who destroyed Google's culture are not terrorists. That was a clumsy metaphor. Rather, they're saboteurs who are destroying the company for their own amusement, as I clarified in my comment below.
For opinions on the other hand reputation matters a lot. You can't seriously give credibility to somebody with an obvious ax to grind, with an agenda and with a certain history. Even if that opinion seems valid, you may just be suffering from confirmation bias and at the very least you should seek out that confirmation from people you can trust.
There's a lot of good, and there's some bad, to Google. Whenever I post honestly about the place, there are 3 or 4 people who consistently come out for a fight. I don't mind that they exist and do what they do, because it's free entertainment for me, but regarding "people you can trust"... anyone who trusts them over me is too stupid to live. Trust me or trust none of us.
I am not claiming to be unbiased, and my experience at Google is rather limited. (I was there in what I've been told were the worst 6 months for the company's culture.) However, I learned an incredible amount in that time (more than most people learn in 10 years) about what happens to make good companies go bad.
It's amazing to me how, if I write a post that's 90% pro-Google and 10% critical, people who I have never met come out of the woodwork to get their flamewar on. I think they enjoy it. I don't. I'm over that stuff and I find it tedious.
Protip: they're not laughing "with you" when you compare your managers to Osama bin Laden.
Saboteur is a better metaphor for the execs who came up with this shit than terrorist. They are maliciously destroying a company for amusement, but they're doing it from the inside. It's sabotage, not terrorism.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing the people who came up with the calibration-score and transfer-block nonsense at Google getting "a boot in [their] ass, it's the American way". Anyone who thinks it's morally acceptable to make political-success reviews part of the transfer packet deserves no less.
It is. The only thing missing is the hordes of people I could connect to. It's a lonely place to hang out at Google+ and I check my streams less often than I would want to.
The best thing is that they might just be able to keep it in life-support for ages because it's hooked to other Google services. What that means, effectively, is waiting for Facebook to make a major screw up and drive a hefty flock of users to the next popular alternative—Google+.
Answer: google+
Lots of g+ is hidden of course because people don't post everything publicly. I like g+ much better than facebook and wish my non geeky friends and family would come over to it.
First, they should not make people register for Google+. They shouldn't even call it Google+. It should just be a feature added to gmail: pages. You create gmail pages and you manage access to gmail pages. Access is not granted to other "Google+" accounts (there's no such thing), but to any set of email contacts. Access may also be made public, in which case a gmail page acts as a lightweight blog post (though you might require login to comment).
That's it. Rather than sending a friend an invitation to Google+, you'd send a link to an interesting gmail page. If it's access controlled (not public), then when they click to retrieve it, if they don't have the cookie yet, they'd need to check their email and click the Google just sent.
In many respects, it should function just like Google+ does now. Pages would have posts, pictures, comments, live chats, hang-outs, games, whatever. And once you're on a gmail page, you could browse up to the author's profile page and see whatever other pages they'd made visible to you. The major difference is that you could send content to anyone without the stupid "are you on Google+?" conversation that has to happen first now and thus can build pages without worrying too much about whether the ghost town will become a popular tourist destination.
They also pissed all their page owners off with Edge Rank, which was rolled out too aggressively for my taste. Since not every facebook page owner is a facebook or SMM genius, a lot of small pages lost a lot of engagement, which turns into less engagement on the site overall (from users and page admins).
I started using G+ a couple of months ago because of their Hangouts, but am gradually becoming more engaged on the site. Facebook will fall, and pretty soon I think. Too much spam, horrible filters and crappy customization on your share settings make it a shitty service now. As G+ emphasizes share settings control, I can see why it will take over pretty fast, they just need to gain a little more momentum.
All the other revenue is coming from companies who aren't measuring. But soon, they'll realize what a waste it is, and once they pull out CPC is going to dive. And if Facebook decides to artificially inflate CPC, fewer people who aren't running scams won't pay.
But I'm sure they counted me ...
Seems like they have a lot of different ways of persuading us to sign up!
I would never want to jeopardize my Gmail or Adsense. It's much better to get my social fix from any other company.
And it's not just about email either. I also use my Google Drive account. I also have a couple of purchases on Google Play. I had photos in Picasa at some point too.
Google blocking your account means you lose access to all of this. Which is why using Blogger or Google+ is a liability.
Write metric is more robust than read metric, especially against users who are simply using FB or G just to login into other sites or apps.
Sure, it's a little niggle, nothing worth complaining about. The grating thing is that they went out of their way to create a roadblock, even casting aside the pretension that logged-out means something.
Yes, you won't be able to create a stream and follow a set of users without creating a G+ account --- but without a G+ account, there's no place to actually store the set of users / G+ pages / G+ communities that you're interested in....
If you clear your cookies or open the link in incognito mode, you should be able to see it without having to log in.