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

https://plus.google.com/117388252776312694644/posts/ZcPA5ztMZaj

by lomegor • 15 years ago

134 107 15 years ago

plus.google.com

brador• 15 years ago

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.

mmahemoff• 15 years ago

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?

vidarh3• 15 years ago

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.

felipemnoa• 15 years ago

Other metrics can be added to detect a spammer. If one account never posts but then suddenly starts posting like crazy, that is a red flag.

resnamen4• 15 years ago

If there are spammers targeting G+, they must be doing a crappy job, because it hasn't even registered on my radar as a fairly active regular user.

jsnell2• 15 years ago

G+ spam would probably be closer to blog spam than email spam. It'd be hard to get any noticeable volume of direct spam going from a single account given the asymmetric circle relations. But spam postings would still be useful for e.g. black hat SEO, or for making a Google account look more valid for the purposes of abusing other Google services.

ward2• 15 years ago

Guess I'll state the question: How many of them actively use it? Yes, yes, before anyone jumps in with the "but you have to follow interesting people", I know that side of Google+.

My question is more targetted at all those people that (had to) make an account for w/e reason, but just don't open it anymore. I can only assume they are included too, are there estimates to their numbers?

Edit: I do use Google+, I just notice a lot of (seemingly?) 'dead' accounts.

_ea1k3• 15 years ago

I agree... I see more dead accounts than live ones now. I don't think this service is in the success category at all at the moment.

I still use it fairly actively, though.

fl3tch3• 15 years ago

Or maybe they just aren't posting to you? A few months back I read the claim that there's twice as much private sharing as public.

clhodapp• 15 years ago

My own experience supports this. A lot of my friends have Google+ accounts but barely use them. However, once a critical mass of this sort of users exists, they should quickly "flash" to active users, as people realize that the bulk of their friends actually are on Google+.

patrickaljord• 15 years ago

I remember twitter used to have a retention rate of 30% in 2009 when it was starting to get popular, and it was probably less so before that https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+retention+rate+&... I used to see lots of twitter dead accounts at that time too.

If we apply this to google+, then it would be 18 million active users if the 60MM is to be believed. That being said, no numbers of active users have been announced so there is no way to know.

endtime• 15 years ago

I use Google+ and I find it much better than Facebook for my use cases. I actually get a decent number of comments on my posts (comparable to those on Facebook). They come from a smaller and more specific set of people, but they're also generally of higher quality.

timdorr• 15 years ago

Users are one thing, active users are another. How many posts are being made? Are they just signing up for these accounts and never coming back? There's a reason Facebook and Twitter quote active users when announcing how many people are actually using their products.

brendano• 15 years ago

Yes. For example, the Facebook numbers are always number of people who've logged in at least once in the last 28 or 30 days (or something) -- I'm sure the G+ people are computing this internally. The fact they don't report it implies it may be a bit low?

justincormack4• 15 years ago

Oh but its just a google login, most people will have one. You need to measure views or posts...

potatolicious• 15 years ago

Indeed. I know lots of people who signed up for G+ to check it out, I only know two people who still actively post to it. I just checked my news feed, and it's entirely filled with posts by celebs (famous photographers, web celebs, Google folks I follow, etc), and two posts by my actual friends.

If this is at all representative, I suspect the percentage of active users to total users is pretty abysmal.

stakecounter• 15 years ago

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 other; at the same time I'm seeing posts from people outside of this circle talking no one ever posts to G+.

Although G+ still has way fewer posts than Facebook, I suspect that it would need a much higher post rate than Facebook to appear as "active" to users.

thurn• 15 years ago

Well, if they've been adding 500k per day, they have a lower bound of about 15 million monthly actives.

unicornporn• 15 years ago

True dat. I have a mere ~30 peeps in my circles, most of joined early but are not tech geeks. The latest months only ONE of them has been posting sporadically.

justincormack4• 15 years ago

I accidentally created an account during Android phone activation, as it was very unclear (already had one on other account and didnt want another). They could get up to 700k a day like this, maybe this is most of them.

fpgeek2• 15 years ago

Were you activating a Galaxy Nexus? So far as I know, pre-Ice Cream Sandwich Android releasesare also pre-Google+, so they don't prompt you for anything Google+-related during setup.

akkartik• 15 years ago

Yes, active users would be better. It's still useful though to have users registered. At some point it'll hit critical mass and that bar at the top of the page will start lighting up with notifications.

I had a linkedin account for years before I paid any attention to it. Eventually the emails started rolling in to engage me.

Andrex• 15 years ago

LinkedIn is probably a good comparison. I too heard about it years and years ago, but only got around to signing up for it this year. I figure Google+ will be similar for most people, as long as Google keeps the updates coming like they have been.

dannyr• 15 years ago

Give them a break. It's been out for just 6 months.

I bet that in the early days of Facebook & Twitter, they were not releasing their number of active users either.

I remember when I signed up for Facebook in 2007. None of my friends were there. They were still on Friendster.

History should teach us a lesson that growing a social network takes time.

zobzu• 15 years ago

FB or twitter don't have the registration right on google.com itself, or the like.

it's not comparable.

that being said I think their rate of growth is very good. i also like the G+ UI a lot more, it's pretty good.

The only thing I dislike is that it's one more thing that Google fully control and doesn't really open up.

Note that I actually dislike both for privacy reasons as well.

ajays• 15 years ago

Exactly. In the month of December, exactly 2 out of my G+ contacts made an update; and of them, only 1 updated more than once. Compare this to FB, where people add updates at least once a day or two.

I like how Google PR is working hard to spread the message, but I ain't seeing what they are selling. Don't get me wrong: I'd love to see FB have some competition. But G+ isn't cutting it as yet.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

I really don't want one company to control all of my services. I like that Google may have my email, MS/Google my search, and Facebook my social -- and that all three will have to learn to play together.

alain940402• 15 years ago

I was recently forced to create a Google+ account, which I have no intention of using for now. So I simply typed "follow me on twitter at <adr>" in my description. So people who bump into my profile know where to find me.

kierank• 15 years ago

What's the male/female split?

jdp23• 15 years ago

the most recent numbers i saw were about 2-1, unchanged since July

bad_user• 15 years ago

What I don't like about Google+ is that they already have a spam problem.

resnamen4• 15 years ago

What does G+ spam look like?

cheald3• 15 years ago

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 hand.

Twitter, on the other hand, I really like. It's asymmetric, and lets me engage in casual conversation with people easily.

Google+ is a great marriage between the two. Long-form posts, comment threads, rich media integration, topical conversation via hashtags, and both Twitter-style multicast (public) and more Facebook-style (circle- or individual-limited) conversation.

I realize I sound like an ad, but that's not my intent. It just works for me. The complaint I see most often is "nobody's there". If you treat it as a publishing platform, rather than an RSS reader, it becomes a lot more attractive, and then that helps to solve the "nobody's there" problem as a side-effect.

justincormack4• 15 years ago

I thought I would like it, and I do find some good content there, mostly blog length stuff. However I dont really want to blog on it, and prefer twitter for short stuff. I do see more g+ posts here too which reflects the good stuff.

spodek• 15 years ago

"It's become my social media platform of choice, in fact."

Diaspora is my social media platform of choice for the freedom it provides. When it's easy I don't mind posting to other platforms through Diaspora, which I can with Facebook and Twitter.

If someone created a way to post to Google+ from Diaspora, I would post to it from Diaspora also. (If such a way already exists, I'd love to hear of it).

aeontech• 15 years ago

Unfortunately so far, the G+ API is read-only. There is no way to write any third party tool to post to it. It would be interesting to hear from someone with internal knowledge on what their actual plans on opening it up are.

Bo102010• 15 years ago

I really like Google+ also, but without all my Facebook friends (I deactivated Facebook after they overwrote my privacy settings) it's not nearly as useful or fun.

I'm trying a new technique - rather than saying "Hey, join Google+! It's really cool!" to people; I'm saying "Ah, yes, Facebook... I used to be one of _those_ people."

cheald3• 15 years ago

I'm sure this is an individual experience, but I consider the fact that many of my Facebook "friends" aren't on Google+ to be a feature, not a bug. ;)

resnamen4• 15 years ago

I agree, though I think Google should do more to promote this use case by offering rich text editing and draft saving to the posting UI.

cytzol2• 15 years ago

> 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 switch (switch, not start to use both) from Facebook to Google+, and treat it in exactly the same way as they treated Facebook. So I'm not sure if Google+ is better by its own merit, or just that Facebook has a bad reputation.

cheald3• 15 years ago

Before the privacy stuff became a concern, I just didn't like the product. The whole symmetric relationship model just never really hooked me. It's not any particular philosophical hatred. I just never "got it" like others seemed to. I understand it, but it was never the sort of thing that I was constantly refreshing.

It wasn't very useful to me before the whole app platform thing, and after the app platform launched, it quickly became too noisy and cluttered.

vidarh3• 15 years ago

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".

bodegajed• 15 years ago

> All the Google+ hate sort of puzzles me

Because Google became evil. Remember when Microsoft pre-installed IE in windows? It's the same thing when Google placed G+ in gmail.

ikirill• 15 years ago

I'm afraid I don't follow. Could you elaborate on how that means they became evil?

melling• 15 years ago

I do remember...

Microsoft had 95% of desktop market share and installed IE on everyone's PC, which they claimed was part of the operating system. This essentially killed the browser competition for about a decade and Netscape got crushed.

Now how is this comparable to Google placing G+ in Gmail? Gmail is smaller than Hotmail and Yahoo Mail? They are a distant third.

mstz• 15 years ago

I think that comparison is a bit off.

Internet Explorer cannot be removed without damaging Windows or affecting other programs which depend on Internet Explorer's files. You also said yourself it is "pre-installed".

You are not required to be a Google+ user in order to use Gmail, and you obviously won't see integrations in Gmail unless you have a Google+ account.

resnamen4• 15 years ago

Easy - don't create a Google profile.

Did you create a Google profile by accident? https://plus.google.com/settings/ , click "Delete profile and remove associated Google+ features". Voila, done. Your Gmail is pristine and the chip on your shoulder has surely vanished.

squiggly101• 15 years ago

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.

dasil003• 15 years ago

Why are you here?

dkhenry2• 15 years ago

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.

darklajid• 15 years ago

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'.

alain940402• 15 years ago

I dislike monopolies using their monopoly power to eliminate a competitor. Even when the product they come up with is technically superior.

idspispopd• 15 years ago

Google+ itself is a good service, but my distaste for it comes from taking a look at a "bigger picture", as this is not just about sharing cat photos and fart jokes online.

Let me begin by saying I don't hate it, I just see it as a poor decision as Google+ allows Google to make a verified and robust profile of me for sale or subpoena, while giving me very little more than what facebook already offers. (Keeping in mind that while the USA already has low-requirements for digital subpoenas, it's still heading towards a completely warrantless-everything approach for digital information.)

G+ picks up where GMail and Google Analytics weren't able to go:

- It will have my full name (with google killing off accounts that were using pseudonyms.)

- It has my phone number and contacts: With a Google+ on my phone it has access to my contacts, geographic location and phone number.

- It follows me around the web far better than what Analytics was able to achieve.

- It follows me around real life: It can know what I'm doing and where I'm doing it, even if it has nothing to do with the web such as tagging, GPS-photos from all current era mobile devices, events and location based ("geo-everything") services.

Then when I include other google-owned services such as search, maps, youtube & blogger. I'm left placing a huge amount of information and trust in a company that has a business model defined by profiling me, a history of providing information to the USA government (don't forget Chinese hacking) and a track record of storing more than what I bargained for (such as Google Desktop) with the later landing them in hot water with the EFF.

I take pause because I live in a country where there was raging debate about combining the profiles from various government run services as it gives the government an orwellian-like power over it's citizens (they remained separate). Plus it provides an obvious target for those looking to abuse the data. When you consider that in the judicial system, a judge must approve the fishing and combining of this sort of information, I'm not about to hand over the same level of information to a company free from oversight.

WhatsHisName• 15 years ago

I just can't get past the feeling that Google+ violates my privacy. I've started using Facebook which I ultimately regret because it's invasive, too controlling, and has stupidity embedded in it. In the end these kinds of forums are the only ones I find worthwhile anyway. I don't care what my real friends think about what I like, and don't want anyone else I know to judge me. Why am I letting people I don't even know control the way I express myself to my friends anyway?

kzrdude• 15 years ago

I use facebook. Why am I not registering for G+? Well:

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!

badclient• 15 years ago

Google can try and play stupid as much as they want by reporting signups and not actives but I'm glad it isn't fooling the HN crowd.

Facebook long changed the game by reporting actives. Since, startups like twitter and foursquare have followed suit by reporting actives. It is very apparent what google's refusal to report actives means.

jsnell2• 15 years ago

Google is reporting nothing in this case. It's some dude trying to deduce the user count from other information.

starnix17• 15 years ago

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.

akcreek2• 15 years ago

I have a Google account I use for analytics, webmaster tools, etc... and Google is always prompting me to turn Google+ on as well. It wasn't automatic with my account. I had the account before Google+ existed though so maybe it is just automatic with new signups?

sirn• 15 years ago

Yes. You have to manually cancel the Google Profile and Google+ account for new signups.

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

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.

yoklov• 15 years ago

Why would Google want to fragment its userbase by having to separate classes of accounts, Google+ accounts and regular ol' Google accounts. That would be lamer.

matmann2001• 15 years ago

Those numbers sound great, but they don't really mean anything unless those users are contributing content and establishing a community within Google+. It takes all of 10 seconds to become a member, but Google+ needs a better way of encouraging new users to complete their profile information, make posts, and add their friends.

easy_rider• 15 years ago

Maybe the new Facebook timeline is to blame? :)

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

I would love to join Google+ but they still haven't fixed the pseudonym issues. Twitter it is, I guess.

zem• 15 years ago

yeah, i joined and it's technically a really excellent platform, but i find it hard to have any real attachment to it without full pseudonym support.

Steko• 15 years ago

Ok so his data shows 50 mil users Dec 1 and 62 mil users Dec 27 which is easy to calculate at 460k users a day not 625K.

I'm more then willing to believe that there were 625K+ users for Dec 25 and 26 though to extrapolate users for all of 2012 based on xmas day and the day after xmas sign ups of 2011 is absurd.

Interest in google plus is fairly flat:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%22google%20plus%22...

For comparison's sake that is 10% of twitter and twitter is 10% of facebook.

______• 15 years ago

It's fascinating how periodic searches for LinkedIn are -- peaking right before each quarter ends. Looks like a lot of people are looking for news jobs right around then.

tednaleid• 15 years ago

Are you looking at the graph in the post you replied to? I see it as weekday spikes (while people are at work, maybe recruiters?) and weekend slumps. Not quarterly spikes. Though I agree that the pattern is fascinating :).

edpark1• 15 years ago

I wonder if Facebook is becoming the new Myspace in terms of quality of content shared. With Google you have the sense that some people are using it to replace their blogs and possibly connecting on a more professional level whereas Facebook is more about catching up with others and sharing random thoughts/opinions via short messages and likes/dislikes. The first one to have a tighter integration with Twitter and has the most adoption among Twitter users will win. Linkedin --> Google + <--- Facebook Also another thing, Google App users are already opted in by default and with more and more companies using Google Apps, that only reinforces the more professional connections.

rabble• 15 years ago

My question is what happened the week of September 18th? That was when Google+ went from flatlining to a huge jump in growth, then followup growth. Anybody know? My guess is something to do with android pushing folks to sign up, or maybe them pushing it through gmail or google logins. Something changed and they restarted the growth curve with a big spike.

murz• 15 years ago

I think the spike you are seeing correlates to the transition from a "field trial" (invite-only) product, to a public product.

This is the blog post announcing open signups and it is dated September 20th: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96...

Semiapies• 15 years ago

I think the big sign of growth for G+ is its growing pains. Hangout and other components simply don't perform as well as they did when it was a brand-new service.

tszming• 15 years ago

Would be more interesting if Google can provide more meaningful data like facebook: https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

>> More than 800 million active users

>> More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

>> On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day

etc.

azakai• 15 years ago

Very happy to hear Google+ is doing well. I don't do much social networking myself, but serious competition for Facebook is a very good thing.

joshmlewis• 15 years ago

I guess those TV commercials are helping.

spiredigital• 15 years ago

Google+'s killer feature (at least from what I've seen) is Circles. Not being able to easily control who sees what on Facebook is the reason I don't post more personal content to it. Being able to easily control what I share and with who - like I do in the real world - would make me 10x more likely to become an active participant on a social network. It might be time to actually sign up for an account....

ww520• 15 years ago

Circle sounds good in theory but it's a pig to use in practice. Sign up and see for yourself.

rkon• 15 years ago

Profiles? Sure. Users? No... not even close.

It's actually rather telling when the only way to make Google+ sound popular is to count meaningless automatic signups.

atularora• 15 years ago

Is there any correlation between G+ new users and new Android activations? One is 625K and the other is 700K per day. Just curious.

MarkMc• 15 years ago

One measure of the relative popularity of Google+ and Facebook is to compare the number of 'likes' with '+1s' on a popular page. For example, on the following page there are currently 64 '+1s' and 260 'likes': http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/lego-is-for-girls-12142...

By this measure, Google+ is at 25% of Facebook. I remember when Google+ went into 'anybody-can-use-it' mode a few months ago it was only around 5%. This suggests Google+ is doing quite nicely, thank you. But perhaps it is just showing how Google+ is becoming more popular with spammers...?

duckfruit• 15 years ago

To be fair, the comparison might not be entirely accurate since it is possible to 'plus one' something while just being a gmail/youtube user -- without necessarily being an active google+ user.

vatrai• 15 years ago

https://twitter.com/#!/arunagw/status/151969750518468608

dkhenry2• 15 years ago

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.

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

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