I'm sure the trend lines look about the same, but the absolute numbers have to be quite a bit off as they aren't including black navbar induced visits.<p>I'm not a big G+ user, I followed a bunch of people who post publicly, I visit maybe once a day just to see if there is something interesting...but my visits are probably 15-1 nav bar to clicking a G+ link somewhere in the open web.
After the recent Google Reader update where they removed Reader's social features in favor of G+, people are now actually using G+ to +1 RSS items. Before the G+ integration, you could see over 100 people "liked" each xkcd post. Now, all that activity has shifted over to people +1'ing each post (to the tune of thousands of +1's per xkcd post).<p>I wonder what the breakout for follower dynamics looks like between Twitter, G+ and Facebook. In my limited anecdotal experience, Twitter is great for celebrities to mass advertise themselves with huge follower counts. G+ is niche enough that you can communicate back and forth and be heard on posts. Nobody uses Fb's subscribe feature.
The reasoning in the article is a bit off for evaluating the popularity of a website. Saying the usage has dropped in 11 of 21 isn't surprising. Many websites gain users in a pattern of big spikes, followed by steep drops, but with the new plateau higher than the before the spike.<p>When it's a blog, the big spikes come when posts goes viral. I'm not sure what would be the big spikes for google+ now that the public launch has happened. Maybe just a bunch of little spikes in their case.
I don't know but i kind of find the linux kernel, debian, or rather the linux community in general quite active there. Its seems to be a wonderful platform for blogging and sharing in public, but less of a facebook type of a hangout. Moreover, the posts there have more active discussions than similar posts in tumblr or blogger.
I got on board early, hoping that friends and family will eventually move over from Facebook. A handful did in the beginning but eventually I realized that nobody is moving from Facebook. I eventually turned my G+ off completely. I think Google just doesn't know Social and they will eventually be folding.
The early data appears to show usage increasing until the pseudonym purges started -- which is also when the press coverage shifted from glowing to mixed.
It depends on who is spinning the news, see:<p><i>Google+ Sees Its 3rd Largest Week Since Launch</i>
<a href="http://searchengineland.com/report-google-sees-its-3rd-largest-week-since-launch-101380" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/report-google-sees-its-3rd-large...</a><p>G+ is bigger than Istagram and Foursquare combined yet Google bashing persists for some reason.