This is an inelegant metaphor but Google+ was the racehorse who entered the race owned by the very wealthy and brilliant owner. That owner was a master in other animal sports (greyhound racing, perhaps) but he had never tried horse-racing. How different could it be? He went out and hired the best trainers and horse experts and horse whisperers. He was feeding it the finest quality foods. He was keeping the horse well-groomed and trained. The owner convinced many of the fans of his other sports properties that he had a real winner, that it didn't matter if he had never tried to compete in this sport (although he did dabble in it once before with a horse named Buzz). He was going to be a champion, too. He was going to take down the Triple Crown winner, FaceBook.

On the day of the race, the owner had a bunch of his friends bet on Plus. He even bought tickets for fans of his other sports that had no interest in horse racing. Plus, stood attentively in his gate, ready for the bell. FaceBook had been here before and all of her fans were accustomed to her winning. She knew what to do. Sure, she had a few flaws in her game but she was working those out. The bell, rings, the gates swing open and FaceBook flies out. Plus just stands there. Then, he starts into a nice trot. His pace is torrid. There's no possible way he'll catch up to FaceBook. Is there? The Plus fans are hopeful. Maybe he'll figure it out and get going and catch up. But, it doesn't happen. Plus will lose. The owner has misjudged this sport. His horse has never raced before. It didn't understand what it takes to be a winner. Sure, it had the training and preparation. But lacked the experience and momentum.

Like I said - inelegant.

The problem that I have with Google+ is that it gets things precisely backwards. I realized that when I wanted to post something, I posted it to a select Circle; to my "Buddies," let's say. Of those buddies, maybe three of them were actually participating on Google+. The other 25-30 had no idea what was going on and they weren't really an audience for whatever I was sharing. Those 25-30 were having a hard enough time figuring out Facebook, let alone be introduced to entirely new social media ecosystem. The Barrier to Entry was just too high for most. Facebook approaches is from the other end: blast everyone with a post by default and, if you want to change who sees what, you can. This is the best social approach. Not the other way around. Half the time, I forgot who was in what circle anyway.

Then, you've got Signal-to-Noise ratio issues which I won't get into here. Suffice it to say that most of the items coming up in my main Newsfeed (Stream) were from famous people I was following that I had little interest in getting a million posts from. No one in my real life, aside from a few, were posting. Lots of noise, no signal. The effect was that I felt like the guy standing on stage, talking to an audience of about four. In this social media world, that's a lonely feeling. What does that say about my ego? I'm not sure...

Finally, Google is flooding the news wire with stories about how many users it has (and gaining) without explaining that those are all PASSIVE users. Basically, if you sign up for Gmail, you get a G+ account. Even if you never use it, they count you as a G+ user. Who cares?

Social Media networks are only as good as the number of people who actually use the damn thing.

As of February 1st, I'm moving my activity back to Facebook. Not that anybody really cares. 

There’s an old adage. Mark Cuban uses it a lot when talking about why you shouldn’t invest the stock market. It goes like this: In any given situation where you have an investment at stake, take a look at all the players in the room. If you can’t find the sucker, you’re it! Basically, you have to have an edge in today’s volatile markets if you expect any kind of real return (or to avoid serious losses!). By edge, I mean some kind of inside information that tips you off as to which way the chips will fall.

I don’t have this edge. Vegas has had this figured out for years. It’s precisely why I don’t gamble and why Warren Buffett has long advocated that the small investor (that’s you and me) forgo “playing the stock market” on individual company stocks and simply put our money into cheap index funds. We just don’t have the time to find the edge.

Better to not play at all than to be the sucker in the room.

I play an internet game called the Hollywood Stock Exchange. It emulates the real stock market and contains many of the investment vehicles that you might find in real life (e.g. – Movie Stocks, Star Bonds, Opening Week Derivatives, etc.). And you can buy, sell, short, and call all day long with these things. It’s a great testing ground for finding out exactly how bad I’d actually be with real money. Of course, there’s the benefit that I can usually tell you with great accuracy which movies are coming out this weekend and, on Monday, how much they made. Basically, I lose my ass on a regular basis. For instance, I shorted The Devil Inside last weekend and lost about $1mm. It killed my HSX net worth. After seeing the trailer and reading a few early reviews, the movie looked (and likely is) awful and I thought that the word would get out after Friday night how bad it was. I figured that the numbers would fall off the rest of the weekend. Oh, how wrong I was. On Monday morning, Pajiba had a nice little piece on the Ten Highest Grossing Movies of Any Opening Weekend to Start the New Year. Hello! Meet the sucker!

There’s another arena in which I fear I have made a bad gamble with equally non-monetary losses. It’s the social media bet. Six months ago, Google+ entered the scene. In November 2011, I decided to go all in on G+ and exclusively engage there instead of FaceBook. I thought that a company as inventive and adept as Google would nail it. Was this a good move? I’ll tell you what I have found next week.