digitalista

parislemon:

I very much enjoy this tweet by Box CEO Aaron Levie.

Google, if you’re going to boast about numbers, you need to be more specific. 100 million active Google+ users — but everyone is still confused as to what exactly “active” means here.

Here’s what I do know: basically no one I know is actively using Google+. Yes, some of it use it for syndication (myself included) — and I guess that counts, but should it really? In that case, what really matters are the resulting click-throughs. And by all indications, those are tiny compared to Twitter, Facebook, and now even Pinterest.

I think about this in context of Gmail, which nearly every person I know uses. There are apparently 425 million active users there. But a few years ago, the number closer to the 100 million number Google+ now claims. And even back then, everyone I knew was using Gmail. So either my demographic shifted from using one Google product to not using another, or the numbers are still being inflated in some way.

Either could be true, but these constantly shifting and vague “active” user stats aren’t helping anyone.