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Deozaan:
A while ago i wrote:
I think the dirty little secret of google+ and twitter, etc. is that a huge number (the majority?) of accounts are actually created by bots for a variety of reasons.  Of course no site wants to admit this because they love the headlines that make it look like huge numbers of people are joining.  Maybe google is just deleting some of them.
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Here's a peak at the shady underbelly:
http://gawker.com/5826645/most-of-newt-gingrichs-twitter-followers-are-fake
It discusses how a politician has paid for over 800,000 fake twitter accounts to make it look like he is popular.-mouser (August 02, 2011, 03:58 PM)
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From the article you linked:

While it would be impossible to survey all of Gingrich's followers, a cursory glance immediately turned up a few accounts that featured odd names, no personal information, no followers, no posts, and a small follow list.
--- End quote ---

Yeah, and a cursory glance of my followers will immediately turn up the same thing, and I have less than 40 followers. Imagine how many of these strange bots/accounts I would have if I had over a million followers. You don't have to pay for bots to follow you on twitter. For reasons I can't comprehend, they do it by themselves.

I'm also not sure if this affects my followers, but I've also attempted to prune my follower list by blocking/reporting for spam the accounts I think are spammers/bots.

You've got a public figure who the media love to make look bad, you've got an anonymous source with information that makes him look bad, and you've got Gawker not investigating whether or not it is true but essentially reporting it as fact. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm just saying that the article is basically "he said/he said, we glanced at but didn't really investigate" with very little journalistic integrity.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was true, but in my opinion that article does not remove all reasonable doubt. (In other words, I also wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't true.)

40hz:
You've got a public figure who the media love to make look bad,
-Deozaan (August 02, 2011, 05:57 PM)
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IMO this particular gent does a pretty good job of that all by himself regardless of what "the media" (whoever that is) says about him.  ;)

mahesh2k:
I experimented with Google+ and here is what i noticed -

1. Anyone can follow any other profile in Google+ and you've no control over who can follow you. (This will kill twitter for sure if G+ takes off). In facebook you can choose folks to peak inside your profile,same with orkut.
2. No groups feature. Only group type thingy that you can create is with hangout and that too with limited set of folks. Hangout != groups in facebook or communities in orkut. So people who spend more time in forums are going to hate hangouts.
3. By default Google+ is sharing every post with public stream(even if you select particular circle). Bug ?
4. Sparks feature is not at all making sense to me. It looks like niche news board to me.
5. I didn't noticed any feature that tempts me to stick with G+ except people i follow on twitter are sharing more of their stuff on G+ now.  ;D

rgdot:
My thoughts

1. Despite what everybody says I think twitter is too different to be a competitor. '140 characters quick glance' will always have its user base and appeal.
2. Why not circles? To me circles is the next step in evolution of groups. Actually it's probably the only feature of Google+ I would call innovative.
3. As far as I have seen Google+ defaults to the last used sharing method. Public, your circles, etc.
4. Sparks feels like a mashup. RSS feed/google reader/suggested sites. In my opinion if not improved it won't survive a chopping block.
 

wraith808:
1. Anyone can follow any other profile in Google+ and you've no control over who can follow you. (This will kill twitter for sure if G+ takes off). In facebook you can choose folks to peak inside your profile,same with orkut.
-mahesh2k (August 02, 2011, 09:20 PM)
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No, that's not true.  You can block others from following you.  It even says that in the e-mail notification you receive.

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