Google+: people not spending as long on it as Facebook

We know lots of people have joined Google+ – ten million, according to the most recent official figures, probably almost double that according to various estimates – but how much are they using it?

According to Experian Hitwise, a lot less than Facebook. Users are spending almost four times as long on Facebook compared to Google+.

The company’s research director, Heather Dougherty, writes:“For the week ending July 19, 2011, the average visit time for Google+ was five minutes and fifty seconds up from four minutes and fifty-two seconds the week prior. While the average visit time has increased since launch, in comparison, users spent an average of 21 minutes and fifty-seven seconds on Facebook last week.”

For most websites, an average five-minute visit isn’t that bad, but compared to Facebook it does not look very impressive.

It’s probably understandable, as lots of people are still figuring out how to use it and build up their lists of contacts. (It might also be comforting news for the people who have joined, but don’t see any posts appearing on their stream, and have until now been suspicious that that is because they’re not in any circles that aren’t called ‘some stranger from the internet who’s added me but is never going to see anything I post’.)

Separately, the Google+ iPhone app has now been approved (the Android app was already available). I’d wrongly thought that everyone who wanted to be on Google+ now had access to the site. Looking at the reviews of the iPhone app today, there are a lot of angry people who’ve wasted all of 30 seconds downloading a free app only to discover that if you don’t yet have an invite, you can’t use it. They’re vengefully one-starring the app so now it looks like it doesn’t work. But it seems fine to me.

Google+ iPhone app: making people cross