Apparently in an attempt to "do journalism " someone at TechCrunch exhumed the "G+ is a Ghost T...

[G+_George Kozi]

Apparently in an attempt to "do journalism" someone at TechCrunch exhumed the "G+ is a Ghost Town"  thing... So, here is me, wearing a white sheet, rattling some chains, and going  "pft" at them.

 

Originally shared by Ben Fisher

 

TechCrunch - FAILS In More Way Than One

Earlier today Tech Crunch ( no I will not plus mention them here ), released an article about how G+ is Walking Dead.  The article itself is a fail of journalism and facts.  But let's take a look at other G+ fails, for fun.

 

Here is one FAIL - No Authorship Markup

: http://www.Google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/google-is-walking-dead/&view=&view=

 

Second FAIL - Audit Tool Fails

Do this; run https://plus.google.com/+TechCrunch through http://www.steadydemand.com/Google-Plus-Brand-Audit-Tool.php - You will get almost every G+ brand page check as a fail.

( ok they pass 2 out of 7! )

They are even missing rel=publisher.

 

How about the authors?

Alexia Tsotsis - Let's see.. 196K profile views, 72K followers 

Matthew Panzarino 40K profile views, 4.5K followers

 

What other FAILS can you find about TechCrunch on G+?

Link to them in the comments.

 

CC: Dustin W. Stout Stephan Hovnanian David Amerland Christine DeGraff Eli Fennell Amanda Blain 

[G+_Charles Middleton]

Just removed them (TC) from circles... fed up of their uneducated, biased, drivel - almost as bad as the BBC news site.

[G+_Tristan Findley]

Ars Technica have just release an article on forced G+ integration possibly coming to an end. 

 

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/report-google-to-end-forced-g-integration-drastically-cut-division-resources/

 

Personally I liked the integration with YouTube and other web-sites. It adds accountability to what people post, which I'm all for! 

[G+_Leif]

It's one of the days where you clearly separate the good from the bad press. What Tech Crunch was doing is their typical way of spreading a rumor to do some click baiting. I was really disappointed to see that Ars Technica jumped on this story, because so far I had seen them as one of the better news sites with smart people. 

 

It was always Larry's mission to unify and combine the Google services which has been a mess before. G+ was and is the obvious platform to make this possible and in many regards they've already done this. Saying that this would be something new and a change in direction is just blind and stupid from such sites. They're also pulling much stuff out of context. It's completely untrue that so many people got removed from the G+ team and that the G+ team moved into another building had other reasons - they needed more space for the team! There was already a statement from a Google employee about this. 

 

It's the typical cheap click baiting. These days they don't make their money with good journalism and investigation, they make it with spreading rumors and copying unverified stuff from other sites. It's just sad....

 

But such days are a good moment to clean up the news feeds to keep the trustworthy sites and remove the click baiting ones. It wasn't so hard to read the last posts of Vic and Larry to see that there won't be much of a change and if news sites can't do that they're not worth to follow in my opinion. Luckily there have also been many sites who didn't picked up this story. 

[G+_Leif]

Amanda Blain wrote also a good article about it

http://www.amandablain.com/google-plus-ghost-town/

[G+_Mike Lewis]

Have I mentioned lately that Silicon Valley journalists are asshats?

[G+_Kevin Lindow]

Yeah I read about this on Ars and was a little disappointed that they just sort of reposted it without rally looking into it much. Like Leif said I've always considered Ars to be a good news site with intelligent writers, but this time...

Also, I never read Tech Crunch.

[G+_Damian Mongru]

I'm not sure what are the criteria for Google+ to be successful. I use it because you get a better discussion*. I think everyone here is in the group that has had most success on Google+ e.g. most of the communities I am in, and people I follow are tech-related.

 

Very few of my FB friends are on Google+. It's clearly not a ghost town, but we (e.g. responders to a 'This is TWiT' post) are clearly in the part of Google+ that is doing well. We need to look at it in its entirety.

 

*There may be better discussion because there is less people there cluttering up the stream.

[G+_George Kozi]

That's the thing with G+. The stream is as quiet, cluttered or polluted as you allow it to be. The G+ golden rule is: If your stream isn't "right", you are curating it wrong.  

[G+_Damian Mongru]

Sorry, I didn't mean stream, I meant the actual comments themselves. With communities in particular, people are interested and invested in the group. As such you get better content.

I assume the ' If your stream isn't "right", you are curating it wrong.' is aimed at me. I would like my friends activity in my stream, but I need to go to FB for that. I don't particularly want to go there for it, but it is still where the people post things. So this comes back to 'what are the criteria for G+ success'?

[G+_George Kozi]

:) It wasn't aimed at you. I was just stating the rule I apply to my stream.

[G+_Damian Mongru]

No worries George Kozi, rereading it, that comment sounds a lot more angry than I wanted it too. The point I was trying to make was that certain social aspects aren't on Google+ and there is nothing I can do about that.

 

Returning to the main part of the thread. When determining whether G+ is a success or not, then there are so many caveats that it becomes almost impossible to answer! A lot of the arguments (aginst G+) stems from not having as many people as FB, and is therefore a failure. Which is obviously not true. Although, I feel Google would love Facebook's social interaction and posts, and it is lacking in getting the 'general public'* excited by it.

 

* I hate the term, as well as the term 'normals' - I mean what the mainstream think.

[G+_Leif]

Damian Mongru To me G+ is the social layer underneath all Google products. Peoples profile on the web, Android, YouTube, the social stream and communities here. Many people might not use all aspects of it, but most use "some" so this is a clear win for Google who are mostly interested in the data to be able to serve us relevant ads. For us users it's useful because we can easily communicate across those different services and we recognize people much more because now they've the same profile across different services. It helps us users, it helps brands, and of course it helps Google as well. In my opinion it's already a huge win. 

 

I think in the long run Google is a bit ahead, because they already started bringing these services together while Facebook has their social stream and WhatsApp and Instagram but so far missed the opportunity to combine them into one strong product. It's a slow progress, but it's a strong one. 

[G+_Damian Mongru]

Leif Sikorski  That's a fair way, and probably the only way in which we can determine the success of Google+ (and indeed everything) - what is it? What does it try to do? And does it achieve those aims.

 

Google+ is most definitely a link between the various Google services. This bought its own set of problems though when people were forced to have a Google+ account. They used Youtube, and GMail, but didn't want to use Google+, why must they sign up for it.

 

However, Google were already getting Youtube data, and Gmail data. People were already using those products. I understand that Google are getting a lot more resolution to that data with Google+. 

 

My point (in my previous comment) is that Google would love the ubiquity of Facebook, and the social interactions that brings, and the signals it generates. It's a different kind of signal that I don't think Google+ would produce as well.

 

The Facebook acquisitions is an interesting point. At the moment they seem to not be too interested in consolidating their services together. Although it is early days yet.

[G+_Leif]

Damian Mongru I think the time where people used the "classic" large social networks to engage with friends is almost over. The new generation of young people barely uses Facebook (or G+) anymore for such things. They use WhatsApp, Line, Snapchat, KakaoTalk, Kik or similar services for communication. It's a bit more private while still having the option to communicate with larger groups of friends. I barely know people who still use Facebook for private things, but the same is true about G+. I think the future of such networks is to be more an "Interest" based network where you can find people with same interests and share knowledge, rather than communicating with family and friends about private stuff. This is something where G+ is pretty strong with, especially around Photography and Tech, and this is also more interesting for companies and their advertising. 

 

The outrage from some people when Google forced YouTube users into activating their G+ profile was the typical public behavior when some change happens in my opinion. Same about the Facebook purchase of Instagram or WhatsApp a while ago .. but people will keep using it. At the end they benefit from such changes and most of the users had already a Google Account so it was just the activation of a public profile. The funny thing is that Google had already before account profiles similar to the G+ one ... everyone had one ...  but most people didn't even knew about it because it was almost hidden and had a pretty ugly design. It's not much different from an Apple ID or Microsoft Live Account - one trusted identity for everything. 

[G+_George Kozi]

I never even was tempted to use Facebook. "The network that helps you keep in touch with old highschool friends and family". High School friends...I couldn't wait to get those people out of my life. As for family, well, the yearly christmas card is sufficient.

 

G+ on the other hand... I find here interesting people that have interesting ideas. It feels like an old pair of sneakers: comfortable, trusted and secure.

[G+_Nicholas Kathrein]

Your a not. Google is so clever. Joking

[G+_Damian Mongru]

I was just highlighting that Facebook signals were distinct from Google's other signals before Google+. Therefore, linking a Youtube profile with G+ is one thing, but having Facebook's social data is distinct in a lot of cases.

 

The original article was concerning how little Google+ was being used. Saying Facebook is not used as much as it used to be does not mean Google+ is popular. Saying it is one trusted area for Google's services, one in which users from other services were forced to have, in no way speaks to how popular it is.

 

It's been said many times, on this thread alone, that Google+ has it's niches of Tech and photography. We obviously fall into at least one of those groups. Being proud of the fact that your friends, family, acquaintances are not on Google+, and we therefore do not interact with them is saying it is not popular with a more mainstream audience.

 

I don't want to do the thing where people make up a question and use that as fact*. So, we would need usage data to see how many, and how often people are using their various social networks.

 

I use Google+ a hundred times more than Facebook, but I do not see it as a super popular network for mainstream users. Again, I need usage figures for this. One of the reason I use Google+ is that you can have a non-confrontational discussion or conversation just like this one :-)

 

*An example would be to ask the people you know, and people in general: what is their most used, and favourite social network, and see where Google+ came. Insinuating the Google+ would be quite low on the list. I have no data for this.

[G+_Leif]

Damian Mongru I can just remember some web traffic numbers from Germany where I live, and here G+ is the second most popular social network behind Facebook. During just 3 years they've overtaken Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter. Although it's not such a big surprise that they've overtaken Twitter because writing German in 140 characters is a pain ... it's much worse than 160 character SMS in early days :)

[G+_Damian Mongru]

Leif Sikorski Indeed, it is important to remember that it is a global playing field. It seems that G+ needs to find its own identity. FB is where everyone is; Instagram for photos; Twitter is just for shouting what you think (and is great for alerts and information), not really conversation - if it was a word count I'd imagine Germany would love Twitter.

Listening to TWiT, it seems that TechCrunch were misrepresented, and comments here attest to that. I think they were saying that the components of Google, and G+ were being separated (e.g. with distinct apps like FB). Not going away as such, but morphing into separate apps. This is one way to go.