Google+ Now Showing Total Profile Views To Prove People Are Actually There

Google has been operating its Google+ social network for a long time and it has a reputation of being a ghost town. Facebook is certainly more popular and grew faster than Google+, but Google has a new trick for its social network that aims to show that people are actually using the network and looking at user profiles.

The new trick is a view counter on your profile page so you can see how many people have checked you out. The counter shows up on the user profile, next to the number of followers they have. The number counts the total number of views for all content including posts, profile views, and photos. The downside to having that counter there is that Google+ users who don't post that much and don't have many followers will have low numbers, possibly leading to embarrassment.

It's rather bold for Google to add that metric right out in the open, there will certainly be people out there that aren't happy with the views they have received leading them to decide Google+ isn't worth their time. The upside to the new feature is that it can be turned off. A company or person embarrassed by low post numbers, or who simply wants to keep that data private can opt to turn off the counter in the G+ settings menu.

One in settings all the user needs to do to kill the counter and keep their view numbers private is to uncheck the box with the title "show how many times your profile and content have been viewed." It's worth noting that this feature is on by default. If you don't want others to see how many views you have generated, you need to go turn it off.

SOURCE: TheNextWeb