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The biggest problem for me is all the FAKE ACTIVITY you can find in the platform. I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there.

I have reasons to believe that most of the "follow" activity in google+ was managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate the community was alive.

I have a real example. Without doing much, other than being featured in another google+ profile with +500K followers (which happened to be sponsored by google); we end up getting 11K followers for our company profile.

All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them. We believe that since the +500K account was sponsored by google itself, most of the followers were fake and thus we end up having some of those followers too.

We tried to contact some of our followers, without never getting an answer. Once, we got as follower the sommelier (wine expert) of one of the best restaurants in the world which happens to be a few kilometers away from were we are. Since it was wery strange that a guy like him has interested in the google+ profile of a company focused in music and video distribution (our company), we also got in contact with him. As always, nobody answered.




> All of our followers seemed to be zombie users with real names, but none of them had a real person behind them.

I can explain this quote with this quote.

> I ended up not believing google+, and not doing any effort to publish anything there.


Yup. And there are a lot of people who blindly click 'follow' on any featured post, or blindly reply to featured content. Have a look at some of the responses to promoted or featured articles, a lot of them are used to seeing only their friends postings, and assume the content is addressed to them personally. This leads to a lot of confused replies.

I think this shops the problem with combining a public forum with people publishing content to the world, and a social network of connected individuals talking to each other. Facebook is the latter, Twitter is the former, and Google+ seems to want to be both and is not succeeding. It may end up successful as one or the other, time will tell, it's too early to write it off, though.


> managed by bots (google bots?) that took over zombie accounts just to simulate the community was alive

If you have any proof to this, please let us know - otherwise I'd suggest this is pure conspiracy-theorist idiocy.




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