J.R. LeMar

GOOGLE PLUS IS STILL A GHOST TOWN

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The last time I wrote about Google Plus, and how I rarely use it, I ended it by saying:

But, again, it’s still the almighty Google, so who knows? By this time next year I could be off FB altogether and spending all my time on G+. I guess we’ll see.

Well, here I am, over a year later, and nothing is changed. I’ve tried to be a bit more active on Google+, I want to use it more, but there’s just so little reason to. As I said before, I’ve tried posting things on G+, and get no response. I may get a single “+1” or even a comment now and then, but that’s rare. And many more times I’ve posed a question on each website, & compared reactions. Just last night I asked people their favorite scary movie, I posted it on Facebook and then immediately after on Google+. As of today, a day later, I got a dozen comments on FB, zero on G+. Heck, even earlier this morning, I posted that it started raining, and that got a few comments and “Likes” on Facebook, but nothing on Google+ And that’s the same story every other time I pose a specific question on the two sites. Currently, 810 people have added me on G+, compared to 697 on FB, but they never interact. So why should I bother? As I said before, the reason I even decided to activate my profile again, after I first deleted it, was to have one more place to post links to my blogs. But when I check my site stats, showing where my hits come from, I get more hits from links on my Pinterest and even Stumpleupon pages than I do from G+. And I’m not alone, apparently even LinkedIn beats G+ for links shared.

Now, I do get a most of my search engine hits from Google, compared to Bing or others, so Google is still a dominant force on the net but, so far, it’s not translating to activity on Google+. So it’s still possible that Google’s leverage could eventually turn G+ into that “Facebook killer” everyone originally thought it would be, but it ain’t happening anytime soon.

5 comments

  1. I’m in the same boat. Been trying to engage on and off, writing my own stuff, sharing news items and adding a paragraph of my own, uploading photos, joining communities, being as active as I’m comfortable to be. Yet, no bloody traction worth talking about. The few friends I’ve made on there hail from the days pre G+ when it was called Buzz, remember that venture? In my experience unless you’re into football (soccer) or fast cars and can endure the endless dribble of “oh wow, cool car” or “shit/awesome game/player” in comment after comment then there’s just not a whole lot of stuff going on. Sure, there are exceptions but this is the internet and in a high volume social network you’re still going to have to comb through a lot of users until you find someone you somewhat click with – with G+ the pond is just so much smaller, and even smaller if you exclude foreign language users and the relentlessly tech posting group, so the chances of finding good people you could potentially get along with (interests align, personalities gel) are slim.

    I am not optimistic about G+’ future.

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    • To show how backward G+ is, I just finally got a custom url for my profile yesterday. A message popped up saying I was “pre-approved” for one. Custom url’s are such a standard of social networks, it’s baffling that G+ has moved so slow in this regard. This should be available for all members.

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    • I’d question those statistics. I mean, technically I would be considered an “active monthly user” of G+ because, as I said, I have it set up so that all of my blog posts automatically publish to my G+ profile. And there’s the way they pretty much automatically sign up anyone who uses gmail or has a Youtube account to G+. So I think things like that pad those statistics.

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