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Google+ skyrocketed to over 25 million members in record time for a social networking site, a pace that suggests Google actually has a shot at one day kicking Facebook off its social throne. If that's going to happen, Google+ doesn't just need a large userbase, it needs an active userbase that actually post updates, share photos and links, plays games, and everything else people are already doing on Facebook. Are they doing it?
Not according to a recent data mining effort by Matthew Hurst, a "technologist interested in AI, NLP, text/data mining, visualization, and social media." Hurst admits that he didn't perform an in-depth data crawl, but by analyzing a random set of in and out links from users' profile pages and graphing the data, he noticed "that there is a clear tightly connected component that is distinguished from a more dilute area. I suspect, without any real investigation, that this is the core area of Google employees and some of their immediate connections as well as alpha users."
Hurst's data crawl also revealed that 48 percent of users have yet to post a single update, though that only takes into account public posts, not private ones that remain hidden from view.
"My wife does not have a single public post but has thousands of private posts," someone commented on Hurst's blog.
While the data is a bit sketchy, Hurst might be onto something. We've noticed a definite disparity in posts on Google+ versus Facebook too, though it's early in the game and Google+ is still by invite only.
Comments are closed on this article
Ghok
August 17, 2011 at 11:14am
Yeah, I'm still waiting for my invite, and even when I do get it, I don't think I know anyone who already has it.
tornato7
August 17, 2011 at 9:32am
I don't post very much mainly because I only have a couple of friends who could get invites. Once I have as many friends as FB, then i'll post more often. In the meantime, nobody will see them so why bother writing them?
ChatterboxChuck
August 17, 2011 at 8:06am
Considering G+ has only been out for a few months, it's still on invite beta and considering most probably still don't know how to use the whole "circles" thing not to mention just because you joined G+ doesn't mean everyone on your Facebook list has (I know 95%of mine haven't yet), it's obvious this study is just waaay to early to start making any legitimate calls on G+'s future as social network.
People are use to only seeing family and friends on their list and may not be comfortable with the idea of random strangers following their every post, at leat public ones. And it's likely many of these users may not fully understand how to post to public and private and fear posting personal stuff publically. This is kind of old stuff done new and therefor many might be skeptical of how it works. Besides, it's not like everyone was begging for a Facebook alternative to go running to and drop Facebook in a second. At least not from what I can see.
