Have you been on Google Plus recently? If your experience was anything like ours, you signed up, had a bit of a shufty, and haven't been back since. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong or badly designed about it, but perhaps you just didn't see the point, with Facebook and Twitter already taking up so much time.
Well it seems Google Plus isn't short of people willing to give it a try. It now has 62 million members, according to an analyst, and it's growing by 625,000 every single day, Bloomberg reports. Not only that, the analyst thinks growth will accelerate, making it reach 400 million members by the end of next year. Considering Facebook has 800 million, that's quite some growth.
Of course it's likely that Facebook will also experience growth this year, but if it didn't, Google Plus would be half the size of Mark Zuckerberg's project, which is monumental in social networking terms.
Paul Allen is the man with the stats, which he announced on Google Plus, fittingly enough. He says almost a quarter of all members signed up in December alone. "It may be the holidays, the TV commercials [in the US The Muppets are advertising the social network], the Android 4 signups, celebrity and brand appeal, or positive word of mouth, or a combination of all these factors, but there is no question that the number of new users signing up for Google Plus each day has accelerated markedly in the past several weeks," he wrote.
If the rate of 625,000 a day continues, it's set to reach 293 million members by the end of 2012, but Allen thinks it'll increase. He points to the 700,000 Android devices activated daily as a sure sign of growth, if Google can integrate Plus into its other products and services. (Those 4 million devices activated over Christmas won't hurt either.)
Google Plus opened to the public in September. Allen's numbers don't say how many members remain active, however. Last month, some stats suggested over half the network's first 15 million members hadn't been back a week after joining, the Telegraph reports. And one of Google's own engineers may disagree with Allen about the social networking site's chances for success.
Have you been using Google Plus? Or are Facebook and Twitter already too dominant? Let us know in the comments below, or over on our Facebook page.
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters 
Comments 8
Add your comment
Mark Anderson 29 December, 2011 16:42
Yeah? How many persistent users?
Judging by my circles, and those of my friends and colleagues, not many.
anonymous 29 December, 2011 17:54
"Join Google+" button is plastered all over the Google services. Hard to miss.
Also, if I understood correctly, one can't create plain Google account anymore: "create new Google account" page is in fact now "create new Google+ account" account.
So the real question is: provided popularity of Google services, how many do really join G+?
Actually, as Google continues to dilute with frivolous and incompetent redesigns usefulness of their services, value of having a Google account becomes less apparent.
billfred 29 December, 2011 18:32
Dilute how? They've just closed down their "labs".
But yeah, my Google+ seems very empty. Shame seeming how many holes there is in facebook.
Naryan 30 December, 2011 19:38
That Google engineer didn't "disagree" with him. What he said was that the project was just a Google afterthought that they didn't put enough time into, and that he thought it was a mess.
Facebook is a mess.
Google have put less time and energy into things that aren't Google+ and they've been some of their most successful. Think about Gmail. If you compare that to a Facebook competitor there's WAAAAY more work that needs to be done, and despite not really changing all that much during it's early years, it was in beta for AAAAAAAAGES. The Gmail team was *really* small back then and the idea itself was just an afterthought of an employee in their Indian branch.
While not being THE most popular e-mail client in the world (top 3 I think), it's definitely the best.
anonymous 31 December, 2011 13:05
Sorry to break the news to you lot, but Google+ is far from empty...I stream is extremely busy and I've made loads of new connections on there.
But if you only care about what your friends had for breakfast then I suppose you're going to struggle on a network that rewards people who like to interact with a community based on what you're actually interested in.
Mark Anderson: Your comment says more about you than it does about Google+.
CNET: Perhaps if you bothered to advertise and use your Google+ page a little more, then you might actually grow a following on there.
Jono70 4 January, 2012 09:55
I use both FB and Google+ - FB mainly because all my friends are there and it's hard to shift them - but I find Google+ infinitely better for sharing photos etc. and much prefer the "cleaner" UI
anonymous 21 January, 2012 17:05
As an educator and an on-line tutor I find the interface far far better to connect and help my students. I have never been fan of Facebook. Although I have an account... but just the one connection :)
anonymous 13 April, 2012 07:28
google+ new style is more better than previous .i hope you'll enjoy