How Big is Google+?

By | July 25, 2013
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I’m not convinced, based on anecdotal evidence but nothing more, by stories like these that Google+ is gaining on Facebook and overtaking twitter: 

But how to measure it? It’s not easy. 

One way, I figured, was to look at the most popular pages/profiles on the three services and compare them. This wouldn’t be perfect, but I thought would be as good an indicator as any at how mainstream Google+ had gotten, both in terms of followers of the main kinds of people, things and products popular on other services, but also indicative of how those brands/people felt about Google+. It might also reveal whether Google+ is attracting a different kind of person/product/brand/interest. 

Of course, it also doesn’t say a lot of things, Maybe the tail is a different shape on Google+. Maybe the layout of Google+ doesn’t so easily lend itself to following/liking/adding to circling/+ing pages. But it kind of does: in fact, Google+ is baked into so much other Google stuff these days that it’s hard not to like, as it were, pages, comments, stuff. I’d argue that it’s easier to do that. 

So I went ahead, selecting the top 20 pages on each according to SocialBakers. Most were celebrities, of course, and most overlapped — meaning they featured on more than one service. If they only featured on one, I dumped them (eg ‘Facebook for every phone’ is massive, 274 million Likes, but not really relevant to this exercise.) 

My conclusion in short: Google+ is way behind both Facebook and Twitter. No way is it getting close, at least based on this metric. (And only this metric, so far.) 

My longer conclusion: 

  • of the 48 profiles measured, only 8 were more popular on Google+ than on Facebook. 
  • of the 48 profiles measured, only 9 were more popular on Google+ than on Twitter. 
  • These includes photographer Thomas Hawk, Google’s Vic Gundotra and Larry Page, Richard Branson and, Hugh Jackson. A motley group. 
  • Most mainstream celebs had way more followers on Twitter than Google+: 
    • Britney Spears (4x)
    • Bruno Mars (9x)
    • Cristiano Ronaldo (7x)
    • Justin Timberlake (34x)
  • Most mainstream celebs had way more followers on Facebook than Google+: 
    • Barack Obama (12x) 
    • Beyonce (1,774x) 
    • Britney Spears (4x) 
    • Bruno Mars (20x) 
    • Cristiano Ronaldo (22)
    • Kim Kardashian (7x)
    • Lady Gaga (8x) 
    • Usher (8x) 
  • Quite a few celebrities don’t seem to have bothered with Google+ at all, as far as I can see. 
    • Eminem
    • AKON
    • Beyonce
    • Jennifer Lopez
    • Justin Bieber
    • Katy Perry
    • Linkin Park
    • Nicki Minaj
    • P!nk
  • Even those who score big on Google+ score bigger on other services. Here’s Google+’s Top 4 :
    1. Lady Gaga – 8x as many fans on Facebook, 5x on Twitter
    2. Britney Spears – 4x on Facebook and Twitter
    3. David Beckham – 5x on Facebook, but negligible on Twitter (unless you count his wife) 
    4. Snoop Dogg – 5x on Facebook, 2x on Twitter
  • Although it may not mean much, adding together all the likes/followers etc for the 48 profiles counted, the totals convey, I suspect, a pretty good idea of the difference in popularity: 
    • Facebook: 1.6 billion
    • Twitter: 612 million
    • Google+: 130 million
  • The number of likes (well, pluses/circles) that would get you top spot on Google+ — 7.3 million — would only rank you about 600th on Facebook (Oasis, say, or Cuddling.) 
  • Another thing to do might be to measure the activity on these pages — when last uploaded, likes/retweets etc — but that’s for another day. 

This is just a personal project, and not affiliated with my employer. I’d welcome thoughts and insights which help hone this approach, or ditch it in favour of a better one. 

Google Alerts Drops RSS Delivery Option

By | July 4, 2013
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Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land points out that Google Alerts Drops RSS Delivery Option, which is pretty upsetting. The message says that “Google Reader is no longer available,” and says users need to switch to email alerts.

Screen Shot 2013 07 03 at 4 11 08 PM

Seems that Google is either just dumping RSS wholesale or that the feed engine that ran the RSS alerts was part of the Reader infrastructure. (You can still subscribe to Google News alerts by RSS, and news search terms, it seems, so I have no idea what the link is.) 

As commenters point out, this is going to break a lot more than simply Google Alerts. A lot of websites embedded feeds into their sites using Google RSS alerts:

Screen Shot 2013 07 03 at 4 08 11 PM

It’s an odd state of affairs for Google, which either didn’t anticipate the backlash or is so intent on chasing Facebook that it doesn’t care.  

Another option suggested by commenters: Talkwalker Alerts – The best free alternative to Google Alerts. It even looks like Google Alerts: 

Screen Shot 2013 07 03 at 4 10 30 PM

Haven’t tried it but seems to offer the goods. 

The rebirth of RSS?

By | July 24, 2013
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This is a column written for the BBC World Service (here’s the show.). Views are my own, and do not represent those of my employer, Thomson Reuters. 

I’ve been wrong about a lot of things, but I’ve been particularly wrong about something called RSS. RSS is a simple standard, dreamed up during the halcyon days of the social web when there were enough interesting people writing blogs for it to become somewhat onerous to drop in, as it were, to see whether their website had been updated. In other words, there was a critical mass of bloggers to take blogging into the mainstream, but there was no easy way for the medium to scale from the point of view of readers. It was like everyone printing their own newsletter but asking interested readers to drop by their office every so often on the off-chance that a new edition had been published. 

So RSS, short for really simple syndication, was born. Essentially it wrapped up all the blog posts into a feed, a bit like a wire service, and pumped it out to anyone who wanted to subscribe. It worked brilliantly, but contained within in the seeds of its own — and, I would argue, social media’s — demise. 

The problem was this: As RSS became more popular more blogs used it. And websites. Reuters has a dozen or so; the BBC too. Soon every website was expected to have at least one RSS feed. Software called Readers became the main way to digest and manage all these feeds, and they worked well. So well  that Google got into the game, and soon dominated it. But adding feeds was still a tad awkward, but really RSS’ demise was, in my view, because of something else. 

As social media grew — I’m talking the early years here, when blogging was the preferred medium of expression, and when a certain civility held sway — it contained essential contradictions. Not everyone could be a creator, because then no one would have time to read what everyone else had written. A few kings and queens of social media emerged, and while a long thin tail remained, for the most part blogging simply grew to become like what old media was. Lots of “Talent”, lots of unrecognised talent.

In its place grew a different kind of content that could be more easily commercialised — the breadcrumbs of daily life, the links we share — which we now think of as Facebook, Twitter, Kakaotalk and WhatsApp. Content has become shorter,  and while some of those tools initially used the RSS standard to deliver it, for the most part each became a walled garden, largely fenced off from each other and driven by the value in the data that we shared, wittingly or unwittingly. 

So back to RSS. RSS is still with us, though Google is canning their service soon (eds: July 1). I am a tad upset, having predicted RSS would sweep the world. I was wrong in that, failing to take into account that content, like everything else, will tend to cater to shorter attention spans and the economics of the marketplace. But I do have hope that RSS won’t die off entirely. There are glitzy tablet apps for those who like their reading to come with big pictures and swooshy noises when you turn the digital page. A host of companies, including, ironically the once undisputed kings of the walled garden, AOL, are launching readers for Google refugees. 

I for one still need to fix some problems with my own RSS habits — the tendency to acquire new ones, the failure to read the ones I do subscribe to — but at least some people somewhere thinks there’s life in a daily diet of serious, lengthy reading without lots of eye candy. 

In Malaysia, online election battles take a nasty turn

By | May 5, 2013
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2013 05 03 15 49 30

Jahabar Sadiq of The Malaysian Insider

Here’s a piece I did from KL on Saturday ahead of Sunday’s election. It was pushed out ahead of the poll for obvious reasons but it might have a broader interest in how the battle for influence over online media has evolved in Malaysia, with relevance elsewhere. 

May 4 (Reuters) – Ahead of Malaysia’s elections on Sunday, independent online media say they are being targeted in Internet attacks which filter content and throttle access to websites, threatening to deprive voters of their main source of independent reporting.

Independent online news sites have emerged in recent years to challenge the dominance of mostly government-linked traditional media. The government denies any attempts to hobble access to the Internet in the run-up to a close-fought election.

“During the 2008 election we were wiped off the Internet,” said Premesh Chandran, CEO of independent online news provider Malaysiakini.

“Our concern is that we’ll see a repeat of that on May 5. Can we really live without independent media on election night, given that both sides might not accept the result?”

More here: In Malaysia, online election battles take a nasty turn