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Uncategorized Monday, October 10th 2011 at 2:38 pm

Google+ Active Use Down 60%

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Despite seeing a 1269% boost when it opened access to everyone, rival to the Facebook throne Google+ has now dropped off a little. According to numbers from Chitika Insights, Google+ has lost about 60% of its active users. While the accounts still exist, they just haven’t been used in ages –like mine for example. This means that although Google+ is populated, it is populated largely by tumbleweeds.

In the beginning, when Google+ was invite only, it managed to garner a lot of attention by being generally inaccessable. Everyone was clamouring for invites and pouring over the features. That exitement appears to have carried over to the public launch date, but not very far beyond. Breaking through Facebook’s strong but-this-is-what-I’m-familiar-with defenses may have proven harder than previously thought.

Still, Google+ is probably doing a favor to social networking by simply existing, so long as it continues to do that. Out of fear of losing users to Google+, Facebook has made some moves to improve itself by mimicking Google+ features as well as by making its privacy settings a little more transparent. It is also worth considering that this drop in active use may be the real beginning of Google+. By virtue of launching a social network during the social network Golden Age, (debatably) Google+ was bound to see a huge influx of people who were just interested in any prospective not-Facebook. Now with those people clearing out, Google+ can cater to the remaining active, presumably committed users and grow to be something special in its own right.

Given the nature of the social networking beast, it is going to be hard to try and declare a winner while Google+ and Facebook are still both out there. Google+ also has the benefit of being backed by one of the most influential companies shaping the Internet landscape. As such, it is shoehorned into all kinds of services people already use and isn’t going anywhere. For the meantime, I’m just going to continue hardly using Google+ or Facebook until something convinces me to do otherwise and with both still on the table, bumping up against each other, there’s a good chance that might actually happen.

(via The Inquirer)

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  • http://CRZ.net/ CRZ

    And 80% of THAT use is generated from posts by Tom, Wil Wheaton and Mark Cuban and the thousands of generally useless comments attached thereto.

    I’m still rooting for Diaspora* (let me know if you need an invite!)

  • http://profiles.google.com/droid101 Ash B

    Wrong.  Google+ is great because you can make your posts private so easily.  I haven’t posted a single public post.  So, to you people, I would appear “inactive” when I am anything but.

  • http://twitter.com/Longasc Longasc

    I use both but very much prefer Google+. I sometimes have more to say than 140 chars about what I am doing right now and find Google+ is very good for private conversations in smaller circles.

    You often get people to talk about things they would never do on Blogs or on Twitter.

    Yeah, I posted this with my Twitter account. It’s enough that people who know me get to know my real name and very much like Ash B I also only post in my circles, never ever public.

    People who don’t like Google+ moan about the 5000 people per circle limit. But hey, don’t believe for a moment Ashton Kutcher reads you tweets if you are one of his million followers.

    Twitter and Google+ are my favorite networks of choice and if I would have to pick one it would be Google+