I have the feeling Google+ is widely used, just not publicly. My family uses it daily, but it is a private circle so you'd never see the traffic.
Additionally Google tends to head-shot products that aren't working (Wave, etc) so I'm inclined to believe they have private metrics that are promising.
The problem with Google+ isn't that it has a bad mobile experience, it's that it offers no reason for people to leave Facebook. I don't see how hiring the founder of Polar will have any effect on that fundamental problem.
Facebook provides plenty of reason to leave Facebook. The only problem is getting a critical mass of people somewhere else. Everyone's still on Facebook because all their friends are on Facebook.
Not to the average person, it doesn't. HN's hatred of facebook is a well documented thing, but to the average user, it's the place where you go to look at pictures and talk with friends and so on.
Find any thread on HN that deals with Facebook primarily. The comments will run along the lines of (evil/intelligence gathering front/destroying communication) and all manner of other emotionally loaded and/or objectively incorrect nonsense.
There's not liking or not using a service, and then there's pathological hatred.
I have never read a single positive thought on Facebook on this entire site in my entire time here.
>> Find any thread on HN that deals with Facebook primarily. The comments will run along the lines of (evil/intelligence gathering front/destroying communication) and all manner of other emotionally loaded and/or objectively incorrect nonsense.
I know them, they all express hatred for Facebook, but curiously, they never explain why.
>> There's not liking or not using a service, and then there's pathological hatred.
There is, but the reason is unknow to me.
>> I have never read a single positive thought on Facebook on this entire site in my entire time here.
Neather I, but again, the reason of so much hatred remains a mistery.
My theory is that those people hate Facebook because it is something that Google can't be, no matter how hard it tries, and they think Google should have that spot.
But why?
Are they getting pay to do it, it is because they are die hard fan boys?, or maybe both.
There are many many posts on HN talking about why someone got rid of their facebook account, or begging for an alternative, or throwing them under the PRISM bus.
However, many of them give explicit reasoning (sometimes in great detail), so not part of some pro-google astroturfing campaign, and there are many posts extolling the virtues of facebook, if only for practical reasons, so if you've "never read a single positive thought", you're suffering from severe selection or confirmation bias.
>> However, many of them give explicit reasoning (sometimes in great detail), so not part of some pro-google astroturfing campaign
I've never seen one.
The reasons I've read are mostly emotional, other reasons because of technical issues that can be mitigated just changing the configurations, other reasons because they don't like Mark Zuckerberg.
Other reasons of why they don't like it are applied to G+ also, yet they use G+ w/o complains.
Now, if you can provide examples of valid reasons, then I'm all ears.
The only "valid" reason I saw in that list, it is because "Facebook is using my data" something that is stipulated in the license, so, in the end is not a valid reason. And how is G+ or Google in general better than this? Is not. And the same people hating Facebook for security reasons and yet use Google or an Android phone are not congruent with their ideas.
In other words, those people hate Facebook and they don't even know why.
Well there are certainly more reasons than that, so I'm not sure you even went through the first page, let alone the 28 other pages of results. Moreover, it's ok to "express hatred for facebook" and have that thing be something intrinsic to social networks. And considering the 718 posts just with that search, I don't believe you even went through the first page.
Second, only 5 of the first 25 posts there even mention Google and most of those are also objecting to the same practices fro Google that they're objecting to from Facebook, so, as I said, you may be suffering from more than a little confirmation bias here.
The search query is "I deleted facebook", the results stop being relevant after the first page, the rest is just noice, the problem is that you have failed to point to me to valid examples of motives to hate Facebook, weird, since you afirmed there were several well documented, yet, you have showed the quantity of zero.
So, you can't show me an example, I assume you are bluffing and neather you or anyone here has a valid reason to hate Facebook, at least not a reazoned one, just emotional.
I don't think Google+ needs to have people leave Facebook, it simply needs to offer great ways to share content with people so that users have a seamless experience on YouTube, Photos, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, etc.
The Google+ stream is basically more of a (much, much) better Twitter than a Facebook clone. I use it for public work related communication and specific topics via communities and hashtags.
Google+ should have been a seamless (and transparent!) way of sharing content from all Google services.
Instead it is a weird social network, seated between the seats of a twitter and a facebook clone. It's probably great for twitter style yelling in the wind, but it really looks like its a facebook style only-shared-with-mutual-friends kind of network.
And Google services are awkwardly connected through G+. Are my pictures on Picasa or G+? And when they are on G+ are they shared with people I've added to my circles or with people following me? Or are they backed up until I decide to share them? This can all be controlled for sure, but it is completely non-obvious.
It is the same with hangouts. If you go to google.com/hangouts (a google search for hangouts will take you there as well!) you get an ad for the hangout app for mobile devices.
But if you want to access hangouts online you have to go to G+. And from G+ you can log out of hangouts (what?) so what is hangouts? Is it a seperate service or is it g+ chat? If it is G+ chat, then why do I get an email instead of a G+ notification when people write me on hangouts?
Would go a long way to make G+ compelling. There's still not a good tool for sharing pictures/video on mobile. MMS/SMS is too clunky when I want to share something with 2 or more nearby friends.
I wish I could take a picture, swipe up and to the left from the picture to initiate sharing, and click on the "nearby" or "frequent" chat-heads that I want to share the picture with.
Maybe this team can make G+ a bit more engaging. They executed a rather simple idea of collecting 'Yes/No' polls very well and were able to conduct polls for big companies (MTV, TCrunch, Forbes and many more). Seems like a good team to acquire.
Additionally Google tends to head-shot products that aren't working (Wave, etc) so I'm inclined to believe they have private metrics that are promising.