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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I guess. I check it every day. It's true that G+ is driven more by "interest communities" than by "friends and family links". Most of my activity there is reading and occasionally commenting on the posts of people more famous than I. So I think it's fair to say it hasn't achieved Facebook's level of success. Nor, perhaps, will it any time soon.

But again, I check it every day, which is the same thing I do with Facebook. If you want my eyeballs for an ad, either platform provides the same value. I'm probably not typical, but I'm not completely weird either.

I think you can only look at G+ as a success at this point. Just not a success on the scale of Google Search or Facebook.

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'It's true that G+ is driven more by "interest communities" than by "friends and family links".'

And that is one of the main reasons I prefer G+ over Facebook. Facebook is nice to keep in touch with ones family and friends (old and new), but G+ is where I can follow (and occasionally interact with) a number of luminaries, visionaries and tech leaders. God forbid my family and friends fill up my G+ stream!

If G+ never catches up with Facebook in terms of numbers, I'll be the happier for it.

Most people I see on G+ when I approach them and ask in person did not even know they had a G+ account... but guess what, they did have a Google Account for Youtube and Gmail.

You can see more and more G+ integration into Youtube, why not just turn Youtube into G+ altogether?

Have you seen the new version? It's practically a G+ skin for YouTube.

Yes. It sure looks like they are taking over YouTube and combining it into G+ as last ditch effort.

Success being quite relative. I was forced to sign up to both Gmail and G+, because that's what my employer requires, and I wanted the job.

I access Gmail exclusively through my Windows Phone. I don't use G+ at all. The community of interest thing doesn't hold much water for me, because I've yet to be pointed at something of interest on G+ that I wouldn't find elsewhere.

Not saying that my particular scenario reflects everyone else's, but it does seem to work for me and my friends, most of whom have GMail accounts as their primary mail address.

If success is defined in terms of ad impressions then that won't work with me either. I use an ad blocker.

I don't get why Google + goes after Facebook, when it is sooo much better positioned to go after LinkedIn. Most of what Google + does well is what LinkedIn needs to do better. If Google+ allowed people to upload resumes, they would dominate. Think about the value of a Google search friendly resume, coupled with a community graph.

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