Is Google+ really a boys' club?
Over the last week or so there's been a lot of news coverage regarding Google's new social networking venture, Google+. One topic in particular seems to be cropping up time and time again: the fact that the vast majority of G+ users are men. Some reports put the percentage of male users as high as 86 percent. However, it seems these numbers are not quite right. Entrepreneur Paul Allen moved to dispel the rumors last Friday with some research of his own and a few words about current stats.
"A lot of misinformation about Google+'s male to female ratio is going around Google+ and even being reported on by respectable media sites," Allen wrote, before declaring, "All of these articles are based on totally flawed data."
Allen goes on to explain that Socialstatistics.com, the source behind the claim that 86.8 percent of Google+ users are male, is an opt-in, third party service that places users on a leader board. Because men are more competitive when it comes to leader board recognition, they are more likely to sign up for such a service. Allen says another site being sourced, findpeopleonplus.com, is also not accurate.
"They report that of the first 948,000 profiles they crawled, 74.9 percent are male and 25.1 percent are female," Allen wrote on his own G+ profile. "But crawling is time consuming and the crawlers were finding the mostly male user profiles from the initial field test seeding. This is not a random sampling."
Mr. Allen's own surname-based random sampling showed the following results:
7/4 77 percent Male, 23 percent Female
7/7 68.4 percent Male, 31.6 percent Female (after the user base had almost doubled)
7/14 66.4 percent Male, 33.6 percent Female
Based on the rate at which G+ is turning pink, Allen predicts that Google+'s female population percentage will likely surpass LinkedIn's (37 percent female) in early August.
"The poster of 18 men in a hot tub that has been passed around for the past week or two is not reflective of reality and is not what Google+ is going to end up being."
Are you on Google+? Do you find that more of your male friends are signing up to the service than female? Let us know your own experiences in the comments below!
Has anyone ever found it interesting that if a place is overwhelmingly male, it is less appealing to men and women, where as if it's overwhelmingly female it's the opposite to both?
If I also avoid Facebook, am I going to be one of those rogue members of society that society eventually comes to believe isn't actually a member of it? It's gonna be a weird world when they start thinking "not on Facebook or Google+? Why's he hiding? Get him!"
It seems like any company that holds users private information, particularly companies that are internet based, have a few blips here and there, but Google seems to handle those blips better than other companies like facebook handle them. In generaly, I respect Google more as a company and thats why I throw my social allegiance behind them as opposed to FB.
If Google keeps Plus in private beta for too long, the hype will die quickly. And soon, Plus will suffer the same fate as the other Google social networking attempt, Orkut.
Come on Google! Take the wraps off Plus!
g+, Facebook, twitter, bah, a bunch a wasted time and crap if you ask me.
How is Google going to test the full capabilities of Plus if NO ONE ELSE IS ON? It is supposed to be a social networking site after all, is it not? What is the purpose of posting a comment if only a handful of friends can see it?
Remember Google Buzz? No one wanted to join it because no one could figure out what it was. And Buzz was public almost immediately. Isn't Google's main ideology to release early, iterate later?
Another thing is girls will likely choose the social network that most of their friends are on. Then there are other things like groups, game achievements etc that are on facebook that they would not want to lose by switching to another network.
Meanwhile, in Google+
Yeah, its not like this model hasn't worked before.... facebook, gmail, etc.
A bigger killer of growth is software failure. If a ton of people join and the system falters then they will likely quit coming back.
If 1 out of every 3 people on Google are female I'd say they are doing quite well. Given that male nerds are probably more early adopters. Plus, facebook has how many fake female profiles to promote whatever agenda?
They are not like microsoft that actualy come out with products that inovate .