Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure how telling any of this is, usage and traffic are going to rise and fall after the initial launch I'm sure it was expected mainly because the market for social networks is already saturated. Keeping and eye on traffic in this initial stage is as useless as watching stock prices go up and down everyday.

The service will have at least another launch as it gets out of beta and offers an API and so forth and traffic will probably rise then.

As for having a mostly techie userbase it's just where it's market penetration starts, and techies are the most likely to adopt a new invite only app. I'm sure other demographics will take notice when everyone has the +Name on the navigation bar and the app's features are integrated with most of Google's services.

As for having a mostly techie userbase it's just where it's market penetration starts, and techies are the most likely to adopt a new invite only app.

And that's also where it's market penetration ends. Non-techies don't want to deal with invite stuff, so they don't join Google+. Now the only people on Google+ are techies, and that's where it's going to stay until Google kills it off in a few months like they've done will most of their other recent projects like this.

Give me one good reason why non-techies would ever join a social networking site filled with techies when they already have Facebook that fulfills all their needs?

It will stop being invite only eventually, and I don't think Google is going to kill the project it's along term play that they are investing a lot in, and as integrates with all of Google's other services it'll become more valuable and get exposed to the millions using those services.

It will stop being invite only eventually

And why will that matter? It doesn't change the point I mentioned. Why would a non-techie join a social networking site filled with techies?

And Google will kill Google+ because people will stop using it and it won't make sense to keep such a large project going without a userbase.

Of course it will. It's a bottleneck, and once it's unrestricted and there is no friction to joining they will market it to the non-techies. And regardless even a techie exclusive user-base is far from worthless.

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