We all know there’s a lot of hype around Google+. The success or failure of social networks has never been about chatter, it’s about one thing and one thing only: how many people are on it? Now, estimates are saying that Google+ is growing at a record-breaking rate.
Google walked in the door facing some tough competition in this field. Facebook is the clear market leader with over 750 million active users, and Twitter is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 million. Convincing people to start using another network was expected to be an uphill battle.
Google hasn’t been releasing any hard figures during their field trial, but there’s enough publicly available data for people to start making rough estimates. Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen (not the Microsoft co-founder of the same name) has been doing a running estimate based on how many users there are with specific uncommon last names. On Sunday morning, his estimate reached 4.5 million users, and this morning his estimate says Google+ will reach 10 million users today, after just 3 weeks. By comparison, Facebook took 10 months just to reach 1 million users, almost 2 years to reach 5.5 million, and 3 years for 12 million.
Google clearly has a long way to go before catching up to its much larger competitors, and a growth curve this rapid is unlikely to be sustained once the hype dies down. But for a field trial that’s been marked more by a shortage of invites than anything else, these numbers are impressive. After Google+ opens to the public (rumored for the end of this month), it seems that the feared question of “is anyone on this thing” won’t be a problem.
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