Discuss on Google+
Let me preface this by saying there are, in fact, many people in the tech media who do get Google+. Yet, despite their efforts to explain it to their cohorts, many in the tech media still aren't getting it and, when forced to "get it", will still find ways to prove that they don't get it, at all!
I'm not going to rehash the endless arguments about how much engagement or how many users Google+ has (the "ghost town or not?" argument; the latest round of this controversy is fueled by a survey from RJ Metrics: http://goo.gl/0nxue). Only Google actually knows that for certain, and to say that every survey of it has been fatally flawed would be kind. More to the point, when Google has opened up a bit about usage, they've been questioned in a manner that masquerades as rational but is, in fact, glib in the extreme.
Specifically, the issue that gets raised is whether it's valid for Google to count time spent on other Google sites by users logged-in to a Google+ account at the time. Many in the tech media think of this as somehow "cheating" since, by their "logic", this isn't really "using Google+".
So, let's take their own arguments, and apply them to Facebook. According to these sources, time spent on YouTube logged into a Google+ account should not count as time spent on Google+. So, let's take Facebook's usage numbers, and hypothetically extract all time spent watching videos.
There's probably no way for anyone but Facebook to know the exact numbers, here, but it's undoubtedly a substantial amount of user time spent watching videos (and many of the videos people watch on Facebook are embedded YouTube videos, or videos from other sources, rather than videos uploaded to Facebook).
Next: Gmail and GTalk. The critics of Google counting time across their services as Google+ usage (for people logged-in to a Google+ account) also say you can't count this. So let's remove Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Facebook's lackluster email service as time spent on Facebook. Again, there's no way to know the numbers, but they are surely substantial.
What about Picasa web albums? Can't count that, they say, so let's not count time spent uploading, organizing, or viewing pictures on Facebook (except, to be reasonable, when only viewed in the News Feed, and not by themselves). I think we'd all agree that's a decent chunk of time, right?
Then there's Blogger. The closest Facebook comparison I can think of would be Facebook Notes, so let's remove time spent writing or viewing Facebook notes from their usage time.
Google+ games are nowhere near as successful as Facebook games, but let's imagine Google+ becomes the unified social layer for all of their Android and Chrome games as well (which is likely). The naysayers would say this doesn't count as time on Google+, so let's subtract all the time people on Facebook spend playing Facebook games. That's a huge chunk of time for some users. I've personally known people who played Facebook games all day and night most days.
Then there are Google Groups. Because they say we can't count those, let's not count any time on Facebook spent on their groups, either. This is probably a meaningful block of usage, as well.
And let's not forget Google Search, the #1 most heavily used website of 2011 (and, in all likelihood, 2012 as well). Facebook has Bing integration, so we'd need to remove any time they may be counting from users logged-in to Facebook to use Bing. The same applies to so.cl, Microsoft's experimental social networking for college kids, which uses Facebook as an identity service.
The Bing issue also raises another issue... being logged into Facebook on another website. You might be logged-in to Facebook while reading a news article on an outside website that uses the Facebook commenting system. Google, as yet, has nothing like this for Google+, but it seems only fair that it not be counted for Facebook unless the user is actively making use of the Facebook integration. And yet there can be little doubt that this does, in fact, get factored into Facebook usage time either way.
After removing all these things, it would probably be pretty easy to arrive at the conclusion that Facebook is a ghost town, too, but of course, no is suggesting anything of the sort.
To their credit, Google only counts all of these things if you are logged-in to a Google+ account, whether you ever use Google+ "proper", i.e. whether you use the Google+ Stream the way you would use the Facebook News Feed. If they simply counted anyone using these services, Google+ account or not, the time spent on Google services would blow Facebook out of the water, especially if we threw in Chrome and Android (the latter is, by nature, a logged-in Google service, while the former can be but doesn't have to be).
Eventually Google wants all users to have Google+ accounts, and to be logged-in to those accounts while using all Google services. They may, eventually, achieve just that, given time and the ability to leverage their whole ecosystem to achieve this goal. Why do they want this? Because it's precisely what Facebook does! This creates a psychological, but deceiving, perception that people somehow spend more time on Facebook than on Google's many properties, which obviously can't be true given that Google Search alone outmatches Facebook in this area, and YouTube easily rivals Facebook in this area as well.
To say, "Well, it only counts on the Google+ website proper" is to be either obtuse, or deliberately naive, about the reality of the Web 2.0/Mobile world, where multiple websites, apps, and devices can all make use of the same logged-in identity service, be it Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or any other. Even in a passive sense, as when Facebook counts usage on other sites only because those sites used Facebook comments (even if the user didn't use the comments at all), this all still counts as usage because it is generating social signals for the identity provider.
The quality of those signals may vary, from passively noting someone visiting a website (a low-quality signal), to actively getting them to engage with the social network (high-quality), but it all counts! These are information companies. Almost any information is valuable to them.
I asked in the title, and implied elsewhere, that this may be deliberate, but to be fair I suspect most of this is the result of tech writers who haven't yet acclimated, fully, to the Web 2.0/Mobile reality of, "If you're logged into our stuff from anywhere, on any device, doing anything at all, it counts."
However, there may be others with a deliberate agenda: those investing or planning to invest in Facebook, those who have developed Facebook strategies and don't want to to have to learn a new one, various Facebook partners (cough Microsoft!), etc...
Regardless of the reason... being genuinely slow to grasp the new technology, or deliberately choosing not to understand a Google strategy that would likely be applauded if it were being done by Facebook instead... the mainstream tech media has once again proven why they are becoming irrelevant, why unpaid bloggers and even heavily-biased sites like Android Police or Cult of Mac are, sadly, becoming more reliable sources of tech news (at least, for the particular products they cover).
I predict that the mainstream tech media, unless it evolves, will fall entirely out of favor with the public and collapse within a decade. And, I might add, I will be one of the first to say good riddance. The quality people, the ones who "get" the technologies they write about (more often than not, at least) and aren't "bought and paid for" by certain brands, will always find an audience and ways to evolve.
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