Founder of Facebook has twice the followers of nearest rival on new social network – despite not having said anything publicly
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is the most-followed person on Google's new social network Google+ – putting him ahead of Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The Facebook chief executive has more than 184,000 followers on the service, while Page has only about half that, at 95,000.
The service has grown rapidly in the two weeks since its launch, with one estimate saying it already has between 5m and 10m members. Besides Zuckerberg, Page and Brin, senior Google engineers are among the most-followed names.
But unlike Twitter, where celebrities and big names have used their visibility to interact directly with the public, Zuckerberg has not posted a single comment on the service. Page, Google's chief executive and co-founder, last posted at the end of June. Sergey Brin, the other co-founder, is much more active, posting pictures three or four times a day – though he says: "I think a lot of people are under the misimpression that I am posting photos of exotic places at a furious pace to Google+. Actually, I have had a bunch of albums public for some time on my picasaweb page. However, people only started to take note recently thanks to Google+ and when they comment on those photos they end up in the streams of people who have me in their circles."
At one point this week Zuckerberg increased his privacy settings so that it was impossible to see who followed him – he had already hidden the names of those whom he followed – but he then relented, according to Social Statistics, a website which scrapes the Google+ service to collect data about it.
With no clear way to measure growth or members on Google+, Social Statistics remains the best way to keep track of developments, though it is only tracking around 27,000 profiles. Those show that the overwhelming majority of Google+ users – 87% – are male.
The estimate of between 5m and 10m users comes via Paul Allen, of genealogical business FamilyLink who called himself the "unofficial statistician" for Google+: he based his estimate on the predominance of unusual names compared to the US census.
Early bugs with the service, which made it difficult to register and to upload pictures, have been ironed out. But the service appears to have grown far faster than Google expected: at one point over the weekend the system ran out of disk space, which meant that registration and follower emails were sent multiple times because there was no way to record that they had been sent.
Educators think that Google+ may have significant advantages over Twitter and especially Facebook: "I don't friend my students, because the ability to share is so clunky on Facebook," Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University, told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "This gives us ways to connect with people that we can't do on Facebook." He pointed to the potential in Google+ Hangout, which offers conferencing video chat: "I can host chats a few nights a week," Littau told the Chronicle.
The use of Google+ "circles" to limit groups and the fact that conversations are archived where Twitter's are not offers great flexibility. Littau notes in a blogpost that "this tool is going to change education".
Google has also tweaked other elements of the service, including the ability to set the privacy setting on your gender, and preventing the re-sharing of posts where the author does not want them to be spread around.
--
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/14/google-mark-zuckerberg-followers
~
Manage subscription | Powered by rssforward.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment