Google Plus members value their privacy
Circles make Google+ a very private network — reportedly 48 percent of users who’ve never posted publicl (HO - REUTERS)According to an analysis fromdata-mapper Matthew Hurst, new Google+ members may be seeing very little activity from the site’s 20 million users. His analysis shows approximately 48 percent of Google+ users haven’t posted publicly.
One selling point for Google+ is that it gives users the chance to build in private groups from the ground up. Sure, you can make friend groups in Facebook, but I know I have better ways to spend my free time than sorting all the friends I’ve picked up through school and beyond into appropriate groups. But since Google+ has built that feature in, it’s easy to organize people as you move along.
And it seems plenty of people are using that tool.
Hurst, whose visualization was picked up by The Next Web, showed that there is a tight cluster of public power-users on the network, with the rest of the service’s 20 million or so users chiming in less often. But, as a commenter on Hacker News pointed out, Hurst’s data appears to only contain public data.
An earlier report from All Things Digital revealed that approximately two-thirds of the content on Google+ is, in some way, private. I know that I post most often to a Circle or two, but rarely use public posts.
How do you use Google+ and its privacy options? Let us know in the comments.
