"Twice As Much Google+ Data Is Shared"

'Twice As Much Google+ Data Is Shared' Privately As Publicly: A Challenge to Facebook

Google social media vice president Bradley

 Horowitz. Image via Flickr.

Google+ combines elements of both Twitter and Facebook: it makes public messaging easy, like Twitter, but it also advances Facebook’s friend model with a sophisticated contact management system that can restrict communication to certain groups of people. How Google+ would be used in practice has been an open question since it became available by invite in June: would users broadcast to the public or stick to their friends?

The answer, says Google social media chief Bradley Horowitz, is the latter: more than twice as many bits of content are shared privately on Google+ as publicly–a ratio that is increasing as later adopters join and use the service mostly to communicate with people they know (the private-to-public ratio was 2:1 recently and is now “between two and three,” says

Horowitz).

Speaking at the Strata Summit in New York, Horowitz said his aim in developing Google+ is to make it “as good for a shout…as it is for a whisper.”

In response to a question from Tim O’Reilly–whose Twitter account boasts 1.5 million followers–on the extent to which Google+ members use the service for public posts versus “ambient intimacy with circles,” Horowitz explained:

Our ambition has always been to uplevel the model so that we could support the wonderful value of asymmetric fans so that if there’s a celebrity that I’m interested in, we want to support that case. But we also wanted to support the real-life, faceted, intimate sharing where you’re speaking to a room of people you know and trust. The challenge–and this is a real challenge…–is to understand if you could have one product that met both use cases. Trying to be all things to all people is the bane of product management–it’s the path to hell. The feedback we’ve gotten from the field trial validates that the circle model works. It’s as good for a shout–which is you, Tim–as it is for a whisper.

Observers have wondered since June whether Google+ would strike harder at Facebook or Twitter. Horowitz’s two-to-one ratio is by no means the definitive answer, but it makes clear that Google+ has brought an effective challenge to Facebook.