What makes you think Google had anything whatsoever to do with this?

Please read my response to the other reply to my post. I'm sorry for being confusing.

Click on your profile picture at the top right.
Click Account.
Click Google+ on the left.
Scroll to the bottom of the page.

In fact, the OP may not even be a single data point. For all we know, none of those posts are public, and so would be invisible to this study entirely. That's the big flaw here, IMO.

For me, it happened that everyone I was friends with on Facebook were my actual close friends and family members. Before Facebook added the 'subscribers' feature (post-G+), I wouldn't have added strangers as my "friends" on Facebook, and I get annoyed "like"ing brand pages and the like because I don't want to participate in advertising for the brand on my own feed. So it turned out that Facebook was, for me, just a place for friends and family to keep in touch.

With G+, I was far more indiscriminate with my choices of who to circle, so I ended up actually seeking out people that wrote interesting content. I still post on Facebook occasionally, but I post completely different things there than I do on G+, and I read completely different things there than on G+. I personally don't see that as a bad thing. Some of my family have signed up to G+, and I have them in circles, but few post there compared to Facebook, and I'm actually fine with that.

A success story for G+ doesn't have to involve the destruction of Facebook.

The PP asked for producers of G+ content that do not post on FB. This has nothing to do with the issue of visibility for the study. I imagine the study would have seen these people, but that fact is not really relevant to this thread. These individuals do not make up the majority of my G+ feed.

I chose not to name the individuals that do post privately to me, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Please read my response to the other reply to my post. I'm sorry for being confusing.

The statement you're responding to was meant as a rhetorical device, in response to the PP asking why one would join a social network to read non-personal content. I actually believe the opposite of what my question implies.

I rather suspect that any names I provide here will be met with, "those people aren't interesting to me, therefore your point is invalid."

But off the top of my head (and it's possible that some FB posts exist for these people, but I don't generally see much content from them):
- David Hobby (Strobist)
- Wil Wheaton
- Ben Krasnow
- Randall Munroe (xkcd, not active lately)

The thing for me is that G+ and FB are just different. Different types of people are attracted to G+ versus Facebook, and so different types of content appear on G+. G+ is used in different ways than FB. A metric like "public posts" is pretty worthless when you consider that one of the big draws for G+ was its ability to keep your posts private to specific circles. People that find that valuable would have tried G+ early, might still prefer posting there, and would be invisible to a study like this.

I guess a social network means different things to different people. Why would I join a social network when I can just send e-mails to my family and friends? You talk about consuming content from "random people", and suggest internet sites where you can find random posts. I'm talking about following specific people (from close friends to strangers) that I know produce interesting content. These aren't quite the same things.

Maybe you're following the wrong people? If your goal is just to read idle ramblings from your friends and family members, those people are probably unlikely to switch over to G+ or even cross-post. If your goal is to consume interesting content, you can't just add your family members to your circles and expect interesting content to start appearing. I see a lot of people (and organizations) producing interesting content, and while some cross-post between FB and G+, many have different content on each platform, or only post on G+.

The study says they could only look at public posts. I rarely post publicly and instead use circles to limit who can see what I post. While many of the people I follow on G+ are silent (or at least they don't publish to me), so are most of the people on Facebook. I follow a comparable number of people on G+ and Facebook and my G+ feed is just as busy. I don't see how a study like this can draw any meaningful conclusions from their methodology.

Can't you solve this by sending many photons over a given period of time, and have Victor make the same decision over many photons? If they'd normally match 50% of the time just by chance, but for some group of a million photons they match 67% of the time, isn't that a signal with which you can construct a bitstream?

I don't really disagree with you (some commandments reflect evolved/instinctive behaviors), but your argument is circular in that you're comparing the commandments with modern-day values, which are in turn heavily influenced by religion (and thus the commandments).

You can account for energy costs and still come out with a net increase in wealth if you consider yourself (in) a black box: you consume energy (food), material inputs (wood) and produce a material output (a tool). You exchange some of your wealth (A) for your inputs (B: air + water + food + wood), and exchange your output (C: a tool) for someone else's wealth (D). If D > A, that implies the value of C > B. You are now wealthier (D>A), but so is the rest of the world (value(C)>value(B)). For this to be a zero sum, there must be some other exchange happening through this black box valued at value(C)-value(B), which implies B is incomplete and A is misvalued, right?

Just because wealth is said to be infinite (i.e., the potential to increase wealth is not bounded by the "supply" of wealth in practical terms), that does not mean that it is possible for anyone to become "infinitely wealthy", or that there is no work needed to increase wealth. You can't do an infinite amount of work in a finite amount of time. Sure, in the sense that wealth is usually defined in terms of material possessions, you can only acquire so much mass, but it's really the value of that mass to others that makes it wealth. If you increase the value of mass in your possession, you've created wealth because you've increased the mass's value.

You could say that the increase in value can be directly offset by the amount of energy received from the sun, but then that implies that there is a fixed value for a unit of solar energy, right? So if I choose to expend solar energy doing nothing but creating heat (as opposed to increasing the value of mass in my possession), have I "destroyed" wealth? Or is an excess of heat considered wealth too, even though my trading partners would assign a negative value to it?