The relative popularity of social networks

[hirez]

Oldest post on the front page of:

FB: 10am (Three hours back)
LJ: 7am (six hours back)
G+: 6pm (nineteen hours back)

(Majestically unscientific, contents may have settled in transit (or Bedford CF), no user-serviceable parts inside, I dunno I only work here, don't enlist if you can't take a joke, etc)

Comments

[smogo.livejournal.com]

On my G+ stream, the last post was 18 days ago. Well that was a complete waste of everyone's time, wasn't it.

[ms-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Twatter - a minute ago.

Icon love btw :-) saw him at Brudenell Centre a fee weeks ago, back on fine form and doing new stuff.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The 'nearby' thingy on the mobile client is packed out with bell-ends. They may yet do something that doesn't involve snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but I'm sadly underconvinced.

It's a lot like being in the wrong pub. It's probably a nice pub because the ale's good, the staff are friendly and the bogs are clean. However, most of the people you know are in the bloody Weatherspoons up the road, which is a complete shitehole and the people who aren't your mates are either bus-station nutters or looking for a fight so they can go back to prison. So, nice ale and billy no-mates, or try not to make eye-contact with a psycho over a shit pint? Tricky decision.

(Which leaves out LJ because that would be pulling a bad analogy into an ugly shape.)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Twatter doesn't actually seem to stop. Both conceptually and browsarily.

Jolly good. I can't recall if I actually went and scanned 'Zip style method' or stole the image off the internets like everyone else.

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

Of course, by posting, you've ruined your own stats... Observation effect?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Somewhat - I'm not my own friend (take that as you will...) and if I really cared I'd ensure similar amounts of contacts and activity from same, but it was just one of those 'I have several windows open and...' thoughts that come on a rainy Saturday when I should be Doing Things.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

Of course, if Google hadn't lashed-up the auth for Google Apps accounts, they might have more active users.

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

They might have more active users if they weren't complete tossers over people's "real" names as well. I'm still there to keep my name and very idle curiosity, but I rarely look at it and I've deliberately stopped posting entirely, including responses to others' posts.

[zotz]

As Alexander said a couple of hours back, it got an awful lot quieter once the people complaining about the names policy stopped complaining about it and went away. For a while that was most of the traffic, and that was what most tempted me to chuck it.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I suspect that moaning about the way a system works is the S-M equivalent of mithering about the weather. The people on FB seem to cope with a constant background hum of 'oh noes privacy, oh noes UI changes.'

For whatever reason, I don't feel (as) comfortable chuntering on about my life on there as I do here, which is probably daft.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yep. That.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I suspect that moaning about the way a system works is the S-M equivalent of mithering about the weather.

Very much so. I remember back in the old days of MUDs and MOOs, one of the main conversational topics was always network lag.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Aha. It's not much of a theory, but ta for the data-point.

[miss_squiddy]

I deleted my G+.
Half the people were repeating Facebook and the rest were spammers.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Google plus seems to have withered down (for me) to just a small number of highly technically able people and a small number of people reposting stuff from elsewhere. Once the NYMbies fucked off it was a lot nicer to use but at that point it had already failed to achieve escape velocity. It seems to have had the same kind of launch profile as Buzz... initial enthusiasm followed by "what's it for" with fairly rapid fall off.

Twitter is scarily highly used as ever and with an information density that is hard to keep up with.

The problem is that there's not so much that facebook does sufficiently badly (perennial complaints about privacy aside because that's an issue that can't be sorted as all solutions seem broken to someone) so it's hard for a new system to get leverage. Possibly there's some margin in the "non-mutual friendship + conversation threads" for the "ooh, I can interact with celebrities" factor that some people like about twitter.

[reddragdiva]

It turns out that G+ is actually Hitler. As such, I spend hours a day on it hitting F5. Facebook is just confusing.