Comment by chrstphrwrght | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrstphrwrght | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested to hear how much penetration G+ has had amongst everyone's social groups.

Personally I just have one circle right now made up of work friends. They're all pretty technical; about 60% of them were on both my Facebook and Twitter, and the other 40% were just on Facebook. I was looking forward to using a social tool where I could share and hear more from that other 40%, but they haven't been posting much at all. My reasoning is that if they were big sharers they'd probably already be on Twitter.

My friends who aren't in web or game development have shown no interest in G+ though. I feel like the tool's purpose is to connect with people that I know in real life, so I'm less likely to connect with random but interesting people like on Twitter.

As a result of all this I don't get a lot of updates on G+, and those people who are posting seem to be doing it out of hope that it'll encourage use of the service - they're getting more engagement on Twitter.

Early days and all that jazz, I'm just curious to see if it's taken off for anyone yet.

I feel Google's strategy is indecisive, thus leads to you and I's confusion about the tool's purpose. I feel G+ produces the features of a more private Facebook (by directly implementing Paul Adam's model that matches more closely to the real life social graph), but advocates the use of an advanced Twitter (by inviting famous folks in for people to follow) and effectively builds the social graph top-down rather than bottom-up as in Facebook's case.

Pundits have already speculated that social networks aren't supposed to grow top-down, and G+ will ultimately fail (http://www.techjournalsouth.com/2011/07/why-google-will-fail...). Then again Google has always detested doing something too manually, especially when it involves human beings.

Less than 0.1 percent of the people in my hometown (35 of 42,000 – it’s a small town in Germany) have signed up, so few that I could actually count them and look at all of them.

No one I know has signed up or expressed desire to sign up. (I was, however, not asking anyone to sign up. That’s not something I would ever do.)

It will be interesting to see when the first person I know signs up.

Mine is beginning to grow now. My friends circle is up to about 33, while geeks (which has SOME overlap but not all) is up to about 30. Family has one or two. I believe total I have about 56 folks there now.

I would say most of mine are either folks I know in real life (or network/contacts that I've made over the years in the tech world) and some other random friends from Facebook.

For me, it's started to. The first days were like you've described, but yesterday, several non-technical people signed on and seemed to attach pretty well.

In fact, my friend's mom added me to a circle yesterday, and she's a choir director.

Same for me. Nearly all posts so far have been about Google+ or testing its features.

The problem is, with G+, you will see less posts on general because people will be posting to their specific circles which you might not be in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com