Oh man did I have some great conversations about articles on Google Reader. My friends would share great articles to a common stream that we would fight over. It was so much fun because we could be honest without worrying about information leakage to friends, grandmas, and the public.
I looked up some history behind Google+ on Wikipedia and it looks like Vic Gundotra was behind that (footnotes removed).
> His responsibilities as Vice-President of Social included Google's social networking and identity service, Google+. He is widely believed to be the man behind Google+, and was responsible for the controversial removal of social features from Google Reader. Apart from Google+, he is widely credited for his contributions to early versions of Google Maps (application) and Google I/O.
For it's time it was kind of the proto "news feed" for my group of friends.
Yeah, I was also a huge Google Reader fan for those reasons. But Google couldn't leave it alone or admit that it was its own social network with its own identity and unique character. Then they killed it. It was one of their products I used every day on the desktop, to get my news.
It seems there's something missing from BigCo's understanding of how social networks operate.
Google Reader never had many users. Feedly claims to have captured 80% of the Reader userbase when it shut down, and they have 15 million users. That is incredibly small by the standards of social networks, much smaller than even the pessimistic active-user estimates for G+.
The number of active G+ accounts -- publicly posting in any given month -- is less than that. I and Eric Enge, he of Stone Temple Consulting, have independently estimated this based on G+ sitemap sampling. I pulled about 50k profiles off a single sitemap, Enge 500k from multiple. My pull was based on strong evidence that the profiles are randomly distributed through sitemaps. Both of us found ~6-12m publicly active profiles.
Among my thoughts: the group of people really discussing things online just isn't that big.
Reader was far more significant than Google realised.
That is a bad definition of "active," particularly considering that the original selling point of G+ relative to Facebook was its privacy controls (circles). I know many people who post to G+, only a few of whom do so publicly.
Both Enge and I address both the definition of "active" and of "invisible" non-public activity.
1. We're limited to directly observable public actvity. Given the sitemaps providing a population of profiles to sample, that means looking at actual public posts. Anything else would be Making Shit Up, which I prefer not to do.
2. It's possible get some sense of non-public activity by looking at followers and views for profiles with and without public activity. Evidence is that profiles without public posts have about 4.3% of the activity of those with. That gives roughly 4% of the total G+ userbase, or about 95 million users.
Again: showing activity at any time. That about doubles the active users count in total. (112 million + 95 million). It doesn't speak to recent activity, though.
Feedly probably isn't claiming those numbers with any basis in reality. In particular, many people made Feedly accounts in a hurry out of panic when the shutdown was announced. Having used both, I highly doubt users of Reader are still regular users of Feedly.
I'm a former Reader user and now use Feedly. What do you use that's better than Feedly? I settled on it since it was "good enough" but I haven't invested the time to explore other options.
I always wonder what would be the active-user count for G++ without YouTube (i.e. every logged in Google user visiting a YouTube page is marked as an active G+ user if she scrolls down the page once).
