Robert Scoble makes his money by having lots of followers, so obviously follower counts matter to him, but they have absolutely no bearing on whether or not a site is a "ghost town" or not. I can follow Robert Scoble on G+ and NEVER interact with any of his content, so can 1,500,000 others (which is what has happened) and somehow that isn't a ghost town?
If you want real hard evidence that G+ is a ghost town (in that nobody uses it):
I think you're putting too much value on that one data point in order to prove the "ghost town" theory. Scoble actually gets crazy amounts of interaction with his posts. Just look at how many comments each of his posts get, not to mention that every dicussion is on point and "right there". And it's not just quantifiable interaction like comments. For example, I generally don't comment on posts from people I don't know but on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written...because he's Scoble you know? His is a kind of self-fueling notoriety. I think it's definitely arguable whether G+ is a ghost town or not, but Scoble is probably the last example you should use to argue the pro-ghost-town side.
Photo gallery from the Golden Gate National Cemetery, +295 and 57 comments.
Photo gallery from his son's graduation, +135 and 31 comments.
Video (that I posted above), +107 with 17 comments.
Video of "Engagio", +40 with 8 comments.
He has 1,500,000 followers and his best post gets ~300 +1's and ~60 comments, the average post gets ~100 +1s and ~30 comments. The only reason the post about G+ not being a ghost town is popular is because it was spread around the internet (eg: HN) and it's flame bait...
> on an averge day even I will skim through whatever latest thing Scoble has written
And will you actually pay attention to it? Consume the content? If you're not watching the videos he posts or reading his writing you're not engaged. Less than 1,000 people out of 1,500,000 people clicked on his video, they didn't even need to watch it for a view to count, just click on it. How can you claim for one second that he has an engaged audience when less than 0.05% of his audience click his video. I have better engagement than that on Twitter and Facebook and I'm some no-name internet guy.
If the engagement levels for posts are less than 1% I don't think it can be considered active at all. Follower counts are meaningless, I think the majority of "Social Media" sites get it wrong: someone that followed me 4 years ago probably isn't still (actively) following me today, but if follower counts only reflected actively engaged users people like Scoble would cry because it doesn't validate their whole "I'm super popular hire me" shtick.
I've said it before, Scoble is a part of the Mashable type of Social Media, people subscribe that don't really care about what he says they just follow/subscribe because of what he represents: Social Media. They feel that to be relevant in Social Media they have to follow Scoble, just like they have to read Mashable. They don't care about them or engage with their content, they just subscribe so they can say they do. Mashable has 2.6m Twitter followers, tweets an article and gets 6 comments. Worthless.
I tend to agree that someone like Scoble does not form the best basis to cast judgement on how engaged G+ is (even though he proves that G+ is not a ghost town). Apart from his other talents and selling points, he has also benefited from his being an early adopter of the platform. As such I'd say a large number of his followers don't hang on to every word or comment he may make.
On the other hand look at the stats of true tech luminaries like Linus Torvalds: thousands of likes, hundreds of reshares and comments per post. Torvalds is the kind of guy - with nothing technologically left to prove - that the G+ community enjoys following very closely. There is no way your G+ stream can be a ghost town if you follow people like Torvalds and far lesser luminaries (but greatly accomplished folks) on G+.
I think you are using the wrong calculation to determine "engagement levels" (whatever the heck that is). You keep saying "look he has 1.5 million followers yet he only got 50 comments on this one particular post" then you proceed to extrapolate some minuscule "engagement rating" out of that.
There are a few things which I think are better indicators of engagement than comments-on-a-post / followers.
1) I would instead look at how many people he engaged with over the lifetime of his G+ activity. Or if you insist on analysing individual posts, then try to determine what percentage of the segment that the post was intended for responded to the post in some way. I bet not all of his 1.5 million followers are American, or iPhone users, or Android developers, or photographers... or any number of factors you could use to segment your audience.
2) How are you comparing your chosen metrics to other platforms? Does Twitter or Facebook have better or worse engagement? I just checked out his Facebook profile and that same Golden Gate National Cemetery that got him a measly 54 comments on G+, earned him only 2 comments on Facebook (one of which was Scoble's reply to the first and really the only comment). So while he seems to be getting even crappier results on Facebook, I don't think anyone could say that Facebook is a ghost-town. Perhaps it would be valid to say that internet just sucks for marketing in general... But here's a hint: In my 9-5 I am both an internet and a traditional marketer (I sell subscriptions). I can assure you that all my cost-per-order analyses heavily favour the adwords/social/SEO/e-mail campaigns to the direct-mail/fax/telemarketing campaigns. (I sell a low value product so maybe this is why my CPO leans this way. If you sell $1K-$10K products you might find that nothing replaces a phone call for value)
3) You cannot look at a single point in time and make a judgement call. You should look at the trend-changes over a longer period of time. Skate where the puck is going to be and all that jazz.
4) Quality of engagement is important too. A response which consists of at least one or two sentences that add something meaningful to the discussion and illicit another response from somebody else is a 100 times more valuable then an endless stream of "Cool! Thanks for posting."
YouTube views on a 20 minute video are a terrible metric. Many people are going to start, notice the length, and stop watching. A better metric would be to compair the average +1/like/fav and shares of posts to each site.
Views are not measured based on whether or not people watch to the end, if you click on a video a view is counted, whether you watch it for 1 second or 20 minutes is only reflected in the internal Youtube metrics.
Google has never announced how they count views. They have announced that recommended videos are suggested based on the % of videos watched. I would think some of that same technology is being used in the view count.
> Google has never announced how they count views. They have announced that recommended videos are suggested based on the % of videos watched. I would think some of that same technology is being used in the view count.
What do you mean? Surely there is no magical technology or algorithms behind view count? "If a unique user watches a video increment the counter by 1" why would they need anything more complex than this?
I know there is a lot of abuse protection but I'm not sure how this fits in with my assertion that 1 click = 1 view. There was a bug a few months back with Youtube that didn't apply anti-abuse checking to Mobile views (viewing a video from a mobile device) and a group of blackhat people abused this and sold views: they would view a video 1,000,000 times as if it was being viewed from a mobile device and Youtube would count 1,000,000 views, even if it was all from the same IP.
I'm not sure how it's debatable that if 800 people click on a Youtube video link then 800 views will be counted, what reason would they have for not counting 800 views if 800 people clicked on it?
There is a difference between a page view and a video video view. The video views really should not increment unless someone watches them all the way through (or at least most of the way through). Since Google has not announced how they tally the view count I was just pointing out evidence that they are probably considering % of videos watched in the view count.
> The video views really should not increment unless someone watches them all the way through
Although this would be better it's not what they do. I'm a Youtube Partner and from the analytics I have access to I can see that no matter how long a user watches for a view is counted, otherwise they would not be able to provide "user retention" statistics.
"Absolute audience retention helps you see how often each moment of your video is being watched as a percentage of total views. Rewinding and rewatching can result in values of higher than 100%"
They do. You generally see popular videos stuck around 300 for a while though and if it is showing 800 it probably is accurate within a few hundred views.
G+ feels more like going to some sort of gathering where everybody is off in groups talking quietly amongst themselves. It's not empty; it's just not very interesting if you don't know anybody there.
For example, the developers and researchers of compilers for functional programming languages are there and active, but scrolling through the posts, I've noticed that all of us (myself included) tend only to make the posts visible to other compiler developers.
Trying to think about why that is, I can only assume it's because of the background knowledge problem. If I want to talk about random things I'm doing in our compiler to this group, I can just type up a thousand words. If I wanted to do it publicly and have it understandable, I'd have to make a Matt Might-style blog post, and the only way I would do that is if, like him, I was already preparing the contents for undergraduate consumption. Or maybe if it was content I had prepared for a paper that was too introductory and had to be cut due to page restrictions.
Where are these functional compilers developers? I am passionate about functional languages and compilers research, but feel siloed off after I left academia.
I think that's part of the G+ problem. I meet people at conferences and workshops and add them via G+, but otherwise I would have never had a chance. It's not at all visible externally.
I relied heavily on circle shares and frequent reshares in order to find the people I follow. A huge number of them came by way of the AI Class last year and maybe a third of the HN circle.
Nowadays, I circle specific people if (1) they circled me and look interesting, or (2) if I see interesting posts from them reshared a lot. I don't need more in my stream; I miss too much in it as it is.
It seems like when you post something to a limited circle on G+, some notification of the post should be made to your public stream.
Your followers who aren't included might be miffed at being excluded, but at least they'd see that stuff is going on on G+ even if they can't see it. If nothing else, that'd reduce the ghost town feel.
True story. I have about 300 people in my circles mostly engineers and the interaction is great. I'm talking about people involved in FOSS (system programmers, embedded developers, devops mostly).
I have no idea who R. Scoble is and just by peaking at his profile I have to say that I have no interest in following him. This is probably why most people that use Twitter don't fit in the G+ space. As far as I'm concerned most technical Twitter users are Web developers, the SEO (crap) crowd, designers, social media whores, guys posting about hipster bands. Not to generalize but that's how I see it and the reason Twitter is a ghost town for me, Facebook is useless and G+ is awesome. To each his own.
There's plenty of technical people active on Twitter, but they don't tweet to start a conversation, because Twiiter was never actually menat for that. It's a one-to-many broadcast channel, there are producers and there are consumers. G+ on the other hand is more of an equal playing field, it's being positioned as an interaction platform, so it's better fit for discussions and what not.
I don't use G+ for anything other than spamming links to my blog. Interestingly enough I have almost 2k "followers" despite never engaging with anyone beyond the comments on my blogs.
Twitter, on the other hand, I spend my whole days there. It doesn't get as many clickthroughs to my blog, but it's magnificent for chatting with people and keeping in touch with interesting people I would like to get to know (rather than those I already know).
As for FB ... there is still nothing better for organizing group events between scatterbrained friends.
Off-topic: I don't use G+ (or Facebook, for that matter), but I've always wondered what's with its disgusting, un-humanish urls. It's Scobble's (I presume): https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853
What the hell is that? If you wanted to share you G+ profile (say, to a friend in a bar) would you have to spell this god-knows-how-much-long id, or is there a better way (like, plus.google.com/robert_scoble) that I'm not aware of (of course, without using url shorteners)?
With unbelievably hostile URLs like that, you need to share a URL to your own site/blog/someplace that's easy to verbally share, and then link to your G+ from there.
Which is an antipattern, and a smell of some sort.
I thought the story was that they were readable User IDs until fairly late in the dev process, when they realized they were giving away what people's gmail accounts were.
I liked that on Google Profiles I could pick my own alias, I happened to make it the same as my email address @gmail.com but there was still a choice. The number used now is not nearly as comprehensible, I hope they reintroduce something like the profiles.google.com stuff.
I like G+ but it is a ghost town. If you follow enough people you will get good content but interaction is terrible. In the first few weeks I built up over 1500 'followers'. If I posed a question I would get responses. Now, nothing. If I ask a question I may get, at most, one response a few days later. Compare this with twitter where I have under 300 followers and get several responses instantly.
I also find that to regularly get new content on G+ I have to follow lots more people than I do on Twitter. People seem to post a lot less frequently on G+ (a lot of people only post a few times a week). This is a problem for me because unlike Scoble I don't want to manage circles with tens of thousands of people. Eventually that will get unmanageable and unlike Scoble management of my social media accounts isn't part of my job.
I find I get much, much better engagement if I spend time in someone else's comments.
As for circle management, I've never had an issue with that. I follow 2k people and I just wait for someone to get annoying before I uncircle them. If they're never annoying, don't post, or whatever, then I don't notice and it's no skin off my back. I just circle people with interesting streams and just watch it come in. I haven't adjusted my circles since August or so when I made one to share to.
Social bloggers as Scoble are generally useless but this time he raised an interesting point:
Twitter is the ghost town not G+ and he brought some impressive figures proving that.
I don't know if he's right, I reduced time in all networks but Twitter is slightly before G+:
- FB 1-5 times/day
- Instagram 1-5 times/week
- LinkedIn 1-2 times/week
- Twitter once per week (at max)
- G+ never
- Path never
I think his large number of followers on G+ is a result of his very early engagement on G+ spamming the network around the clock. Moreover, the Twitter audience is not a perfect match for Scoble—his posts have a special style, verbose and opinionated and obviously don't appeal to the typical Twitter user (tech and Internet savvy who are often better informed than Scoble himself).
I use Twitter in a very different way than Facebook though, and for very different reasons. I follow a small group of smart, funny or creative people that tweet really interesting stuff, but personally I tweet only a few times a month. Am I alone in that I don't use Twitter as a social networking tool, and more of a broadcasting-listening tool?
To anyone looking at my twitter, it might seem extremely quiet and ghost-townish, but I am using Twitter much more than Facebook and getting more from it, albeit passively.
Twitter is, for me, very much a "right now" tool. I used to read up on missed posts, but now I just follow too many people. So I look at the recent history of a couple of lists, then look at even less of my main stream for interesting conversations/links.
FB/G+ feel far more involved, even if I'm doing the same thing. I chalk this up to the conversations being longer, and more in depth/nuanced.
For me the Twitter use case is to keep myself stimulated while working remotely by interactions with other people in my field, catch breaking news as it happens (e.g. blog articles on new tech), and to promote work that I have done (e.g. blog articles I have written). So when I am working actively on a project, I probably check 4-6 times a day. In between I probably check 2 times / week. I also have used monitoring tools like awe.sm to see how many people re-tweet things that I tweet out, among other things to make sure I'm providing value to people that are following me (i.e. high signal to noise ratio). I also use twitter to answer questions that I can't find the answers to elsewhere -- generally very technical questions.
Facebook is a tricky one, since it promotes addictive "stalking" behavior. I've attempted to use it primarily for messaging and to hide most people who aren't in my immediate vicinity, thinking that I probably don't need to know what they are doing. Still, I am a part of "liking" tribes where there is an implicit economy of trading likes on something and receiving likes back.
G+ I only use when I get annoying messages from Google that someone has asked me a question or added me to some circle. Other than that I avoid it like the plague -- this despite being an enthusiastic adopter in the early days.
LinkedIn I use probably once a month, except in the occasional moments where I am actively networking. I get very little value here since I am not usually looking for work and the technical folks I interact with are available on Twitter (or, at worse, email).
Twitter was amazing just after the big quake hit here in Japan. Facebook also proved useful, but the cell networks were simply not able to handle the traffic and all my friends switched to twitter to communicate.
My G+ account really is a ghost town. I would close it if I could figure out how to without killing my gmail etc.
My twitter account /looks/ like a ghost town, in that I never do anything on it myself. But I'm using it to follow a bunch of feeds I'm interested in; I check it regularly. I'm not sure how an outside observer could tell the difference between the two, other than by counting logins - but for me, twitter is useful, and G+ is dead.
You can close your Google Plus account in settings. I did it a few months ago. I later reactivated it and it restored my account with all my followers (it had removed all my old posts and profile information though). In settings it will warn you exactly what Google services will be affected by closing your G+ account.
G+ has far less updates that facebook on my account, and that's a feature !
People there don't post they have been wasted yesterday or they ate a mayonnaise sandwich. They share relevant news. I don't check facebook much anymore...
I've long sworn off Facebook, and have always been rather active on Twitter. I just hope G+ gets a good, functional mobile layout. I'm not sure how I feel about the current one yet.
Everyone I know is on Facebook, and nearly everyone is on Twitter (with more joining just this week.) I have a large group of friends from a web community that all joined G+ at the same time, so, it's a completely valid social network for me, without having to do any work of reorganizing friends from high school who add me.
Basically, for me it's a second chance at adding people on a social network, and this time, with easier tools, I'm getting it right.
I did, thanks! That's the one I'm not sure if I like. The previous one mundane, but functional. The new one trades in the conversational flow for ease of interaction (+1-ing, sharing, more options from the stream.) It's an interesting take, and I'm curious how I'll like it, but I haven't decided yet.
for everyone that says g+ is a ghost town, you must not be finding people to follow. The entire point is circles. I'm on g+ everyday, and even has become my bookmark and evernote replacement, ill post to myself.
This is often the problem. Unless you are some kind of star in your own right, the odds are that almost nobody beyond random followers are going to include you in their circles. That basically leaves you with the option of circling others in order to have anything meaningful in your stream. Here again you are more or less guaranteed (in current conditions) that next to none of your friends/family is going to be on G+. So you are left with the option of circling strangers only, which is not what you would normally do on a social network.
The great thing about G+ is that in this large group of strangers there is a huge number of tech (and other) luminaries who are actively engaging on the network. Circle them and you basically get a stream of comments, thoughts, links and pictures that are really worth following. I've only circled about a 100 or so of these "strangers" and I've just loving the interaction. Sure, nobody (or very few) +1 anything I have to say, but that doesn't bother me as I'm far more interested in what they have to say. No way you can call it a ghost town when you engage in G+ this way.
On the other hand, if you circle nobody then it does become a ghost town. But it would hardly be fair to call it one.
I wonder if that's part of the point. On other social networks you're connecting with friends and family. On G+ you're circling strangers whose thoughts you're interested in. I think I'd prefer to mine the latter if my goal was to make better search results for you.
Personal take: G+'s circle system has significant downsides as far as following people goes, because you can build a significant audience on G+ … and have no idea where it's coming from. I have 16k followers, most gained in the past few months, but I haven't updated regularly since January. There's no way to track this, either. That to me suggests weaknesses in the circle system.
So, when I read Scoble's comments about having more followers on G+ than anywhere else, I believe it … and I also believe more than half of them aren't regularly using G+, either.
G+ is more about building an interest graph than FB, don't use it as a vanity/foodiate platform and it won't be a ghosttown. I'm mostly on it for link following and I'm getting super high quality science and tech links in my feed. the ghost-town characterization is way off base.
Completely agree, only problem is that your interest feed relies on the people you subscribe to keep their posts related to the interest you associated them with.
But if the scientists in your NASA circle want to post vacation pictures, you can't filter that out. You can try and get yourself included into their "Space News Only" circle, which would solve the problem, but badgering people who don't know you to do something for you, even little like this, isn't an optimal solution.
For me FB is the proverbial ghost town - because I am no longer interested in the contents of activity feed I get on FB :-p . I am sure my opinions don't matter much, after all, I don't have thousands of friends on either of the two services.
But for whatever its worth, I've started to really like G+ since I've started to follow Linus Torvalds and Stephen Kinsella on G+. I like the drag-drop UI that "Circles" tab/widget implements and I love the posts that Linus shares with the public. I don't know if Linus has/uses FB too, but I don't care.
I think that if Google runs G+ long enough and has cool & intelligent people using/developing it, G+ will not do too bad.
The people that I see on Google+ use it in a very different way than the average user uses Facebook. It's much closer aligned to Twitter than Facebook.
The average Facebook user uses it as a tool to keep in touch with family and friends. Google+ is a ghost town for most new users, a few of my non techie friends joined Google+ when it first launched and haven't been back since because their friends are still using Facebook. Scoble and most Google+ users are outliers. The majority of users want a social network to share with their friends and they are not interested in following a bunch of random people.
hi, just as a note: i can never view Roberts S. posts - because they are not public, but shared with his circles - and I'm not one of them (i don't want to, i even once - longlongtimeago - wrote a r.s. filter greasemonkey script http://www.facesaerch.com/widget/rs-filter.user.js). so would be cool - if it's really newsworthy - to post a pasteboard copy. thx.
That doesn't make any sense. All of his posts that people see are posted to public.
Posting to your circles is the lists that you have created, he's not curating lists of >1million people. There isn't any way to limit the visibility of a post just to people who are following you on google+
you are right. an anonymous browser tab could access the post. my g+ logged in browser tab couldn't. means: r.s. blocked me. i'm fine with it. i remember i once posted a lengthly comment (with lots of numbers, figures using an advanced statistic methodology called arithmetic) on one of his posts.
so much for googles open web approach: "public" != publicly available if you are logged in to google+
Scoble has 1.5 million followers on G+? I submit that followers on G+ are EASY.
I've been using Livejournal since 2002 and have about 350 followers. I think maybe a hundred of them are still commenting on my posts intermittently. (Yeah, I still use LJ.)
I got on G+ when it came out. I have 232 followers. I think maybe three of them reply to my posts. Sometimes. (Not that I post to G+ a lot but still.)
That's a hell of a lot of followers in about eight months versus like 5-6 years of LJ being a pretty active place. It's not the 1.5mil Scoble has but it's a hell of a lot for someone who never posts, but seems to see a new follower every day.
I would also compare and contrast the age and follower count of my Twitter account, but I'm pretty sure a large percentage of my nearly 600 followers there are spambots or marketroids, and I don't feel like guesstimating how many actual humans are following my tweets.
I think some of the issues around this come down to the way we conceive of these networks (well, and semantics.) They're all called Social Networks, but that should phrase be construed very broadly. If people are using Facebook to keep in touch with a small circle, Twitter to a broad audience, and G+ as an RSS reader with pictures and a +1 button, then they aren't the same thing at all. Feet, bikes, and cars are all kinds of transportation, but they're thought of differently. We don't talk about the failures of feet because people don't walk enough. It's how and why these things are being used that defines what they are.
Perhaps if Google embraced (and re-branded) itself as a content network/social content network/RSS reader with glowing bells things would be understood (and talked about) differently.
As someone else mentioned, I find the signal to noise ratio to be much higher on G+ than facebook or twitter. I mainly use these tools for two purposes, keeping in touch with friends and following interesting people and topics.
Facebook wins for the former as most of my friends still aren't on G+ or twitter, however, most of the activity is uninteresting checkins and the like.
With twitter, I have followed people I am interested in for topical content, but I mostly see personal tweets and find myself quickly scrolling through them for an occasional interesting link. Also, the interaction is next to zero except for retweets. I don't think the medium lends itself to much more than light banter.
In contrast, on plus, the topical content is more informative often with interesting comments.
I use G+ more frequently than FB and I enjoy better signal/noise ratio in my G+ streams. I suppose both FB and G+ miss interest-based approach which makes them still more noisy than they should be.
Would you rather have 200k followers who see everything you say (twitter) or 1.5M followers who never login and check out what is going on? Simple choice for me.
This is also the natural evolution of social networks - when they start the social media guys are the most followed because they are the most active, then they are eclipsed by true celebrities. Scoble added 30k followers on twitter in 3 months - Howard Stern added 150k in the same time frame, Rihanna added 5M followers.
Have they made it easier to follow say someones tech updates only. I remember early on there was the issue that circles didn't work when you were circling someone but they weren't circling you, so you would get their public updates, but that lost the ability to segregate to what people are interested in.
I have no doubt his feed, or whatever Google calls it, is very active. Problem is mine is not. Last time I checked the newest update was almost 3 months old. Which experience is more common? Mine or his? He's stoking social media nearly 24x7 and is a fairly high profile tech something or another.
It's the result of PR attacks and sadly they seem to be working.
Some of those writing are just parroting PR pitches and some just seem to depend on their limited experience with he service.
Also considering that the number of active users is but a fraction of the overall number of those who signed up (yet still a considerable amount) it's not fair to divide active minutes between all registered users. It might be a "ghost town" in comparison to Facebook but so is every other social service the tech blogs seem to be paddling, it's just that + is a bigger target for PR attacks.
Besides PR campaigns, I wonder if another source of hostility to Google+ is a normal human reaction to the fact that social networking, as we currently know it, is a natural monopoly.
A lot of people are in the situation where they're going to have to be on Facebook no matter what (hello lock-in), and they'd really rather not have to be on Google+ at the same time. It'd be all the annoying parts of social networking doubled, plus the hassle of maintaining two copies of a lot of information, with no significant advantages.
I think a lot of people who disparage Google+ would have no major objection if it could quickly take over from Facebook and become the new monopoly. However, by this point it seems unlikely, barring a major event.
A world where social networking services could interoperate, sort of like how we have numerous telephone companies but one global namespace of phone numbers, would be interesting.
If you want real hard evidence that G+ is a ghost town (in that nobody uses it):
Robert Scoble posted a video yesterday: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/ToU5ESJY... and that video got 778 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLhi1VUbmc).
Out of 1,500,000 "followers" on Google+ less than 1,000 take notice of his posts. That's even worse than Twitter.