Google has begun integrating Google+ into search results with public Google+ posts now appearing in Social Search. Whenever a user publicly shares a link on Google+, an annotation will show up under that link when it appears in a friend’s search results. For example, if I share a Mashable article about Google+ eliminating pseudonyms publicly on my Google+ page, users who have added me to their circles will see a note that I shared that link if they stumble upon it in Google Search.
If you think the buzz around Google+ is bigger than it was for Google Buzz, then you’re right. But if you think Google+ is monopolizing social media conversation, you’re way off.
That’s the gist of new research from Sysomos, a social media analytics firm. At Mashable‘s request, Sysomos compared the social media chatter for Google Buzz when it launched in February 2010 to Google+’s introduction this summer.
There’s little comparison between the two launches, according to Sysomos. Google Buzz’s social media mentions peaked at 150,00 while Google+ surpassed 250,000 mentions.
Since its launch a couple of weeks ago, Google+ has garnered more than 106,000 mentions in blogs, close to 30,000 news stories, and 1.9 million tweets. Some 85% of those combined mentions were positive. Those findings were published on Sysomos’s blog on Thursday.
Now for the bad news. Google+’s mentions are nowhere near as prevalent as Facebook’s and Twitter’s. Each of those services gets more than twice as many mentions per day as Google+.
Sheldon Levine, community manager for Sysomos, says he was surprised at the findings. “From my perspective, it seemed like everyone was talking about Google+ a lot,” says Levine. “But it could just seem that way inside the social media world.”
Google and Facebook are at war. This is old news. They both want to be the center of the Internet — but there can be only one center. For a while, it looked like things were quickly shifting Facebook’s way after years of dominance by Google. Then Google+ appeared — already the most compelling social experience Google has ever offered.
While it’s still far from clear what the actual impact of G+ will be on the Internet at large, it’s pretty clear already that it’s something Facebook is going to have to take seriously. And they are. Despite Mark Zuckerberg downplaying it, Facebook did just launch a video chat feature a week after Google did in G+. And last summer, Facebook rushed to get the new Groups done in time to beat Circles to the same punch.
Back in March of last year, we noted that Google Buzz, Google’s shiny new social network at the time, was getting smoked in terms of referral traffic sent our way, by a dead man, FriendFeed. It turns out, Google’s own Analytics service was undercounting Buzz because it resides in Gmail, which uses HTTPS and strips out referral information. In other words, most Buzz traffic could only be inferred, not seen. Still, after months of looking over the data, I’m not convinced that Buzz actually sends any amount of meaningful traffic whatsoever. The same is not true of the newly launched Google+ so far.
Yes, it has only been out for a week at this point (and is still only available to a very limited number of users), but based on what we’re seeing, the social network is already sending a large amount of traffic our way.
How large? Well, since its launch last Tuesday, Google+ has already cracked our top ten referring sites. It currently resides just behind Digg in that timespan. If you narrow that down to just count July so far (a few days after launch, so more users had time to sign up), the numbers are even better. It would already be the number seven referrer, just behind Hacker News. And it’s already a fifth as large as the leading social referrer, facebook.com.
But wait, Google+ also uses HTTPS, so isn’t it being incorrectly counted as well? No — Google has learned from the previous Buzz mistake (and taken a page from Facebook), and now redirects all outbound links through a non-secure google.com address to capture the traffic. As Louis Gray pointed out a couple days ago, the URL you should look for in your logs is “http://www.google.com/url?sa=z” followed by a unique content code. If you click on any external from G+ and look quickly, you’ll see these URLs flash in the address bar.
The amount of inbound traffic we’re seeing from Google+ is pretty crazy considering that we’re not even officially using it to share links yet. On both Facebook and Twitter we send out links to our followers and this leads to most of the click-backs (either directly or by re-sharing). On Google+, we’re not doing anything yet, it’s all happening from others sharing our links organically.
Other publications must be noticing the same thing, as they’ve set up official accounts for Google+, as Zach Seward notes here. We reached out to Google in order to do the same last week, but they told us that “it’s not quite ready for businesses”. They also pointed us to their policy wording, stating that anyone who signs up for Google+ must do so with a real name. It would seem that Google is still exploring the best way to handle this type of mass sharing for now.
After we pointed out a these others signing up with business names, they confirmed that they’re not banning anyone for doing it right now, but warning that if we do set one up, we’ll have to make a new profile once Google+ for Businesses is ready. But who knows when that will be? It seems that this early opportunity for publishers is one that you can’t sit on the sidelines for. While G+ may have been conceived as much more than a link-sharing service, so many people are using it for just that now. And the re-sharing going on is massive.
Google Buzz was and continues to be a black hole for publishers. But Google+ is a big bang.
by Declan McCullagh
With the launch of a new social networking platform, Google seems determined not to repeat the privacy missteps it made last year with Google Buzz.
Public criticism, some valid, some not, prompted Google to make a series of quick changes to Buzz a few days after its launch in February 2010. Google finally settled allegations of unintentional oversharing in an agreement inked with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year.
When creating Google+, which debuted yesterday, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company took pains to ensure there’s no danger of that happening again. Google+ sports a clean, well-designed user interface that arguably offers greater privacy protections than Facebook, which has made more and more information public over time.
Some examples:
• Google+ has, by my count, 13 privacy settings, each with an average of a sentence or two of text to explain them. There’s another page if you want to edit individual items. Facebook has far more complicated privacy options that are more difficult to navigate.
• Facebook requires that you use your real name, a practice that has drawn criticism. At least in its published privacy policy, Google+ doesn’t. (Neither does Twitter, for that matter.)
• Facebook says that “your name, profile picture, gender and networks are visible to everyone.” Google+ appears to require that a name and profile picture, if one has been uploaded, be public. But gender and networks — called circles, in Google-ese — can be made private.
• Google has wisely turned off this option by default, though it can be enabled with a click or two: “Show geo location information from photos in newly uploaded albums.”
• Google+ makes the identity of all your circles (including family and friends) visible to “Anyone on the web.” Same with “Show people who have added you to circles,” also selected by default. Both can be made private, of course, but what’s clever is that the names of the corresponding circles aren’t visible. That makes it a bit easier to put someone in the “acquaintance” circle, because they won’t know where they ended up.
• When you create a circle, you know who’s in it. That makes sharing to members of that circle simple. It’s less obvious who a friend-of-a-friend might be on Facebook.
All posts on Google+ can be made public, turning it into a kind of high-powered, if not very customizable, blogging platform. But it’s more useful when posts can be segmented by circles.
“A clear and extremely welcome difference between Google+ and Facebook is that G+ treats us as adults able to determine our own relationships and sharing preferences, in contrast to Facebook that treats us like sheep to be fleeced via pressures to overshare,” wrote Lauren Weinstein of People For Internet Responsibility in, of course, a Google+ post.
Google+ is still in testing, but you can request to be added to the list.
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