Google+ Users Double

I was just reading this morning that there are now 90 million Google + users reading, posting, and networking on Google’s new social network platform.  At the end of summer, there were only 40 million — so the number has more than doubled over the last few months, with a lot of the new users joining up since the holidays.  To say that this is an impressive feat is to understate its implications in an egregious way.  If you want to get a clean comparison, to truly have a gage of what these numbers are telling us, the best place to look is Facebook.  

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook social network began as a college student directory with a primitive social aspect that made it a place where people could say something about themselves and find others who were of like mind to befriend.  It was a social club online, basically, and closed to the outside world.  Then, it opened up and began allowing non-college students on, and a whole new industry emerged.  All we really had before that was MySpace — not even comparable to Facebook.  But what is truly impressive and says the most to the current status of Google +’s growth is the fact that it took Facebook about 4 years to reach that number of users.  Is something unprecedented really going on here?  Something that could ultimately challenge the dominance of Facebook in social networking?

“I’m not so sure it’s time to get excited about this right now,” said Pete Wiserly, an analyst. “The numbers are certainly impressive, but we have to remember that Google+ recently linked all of its services to the new social network.  A lot of people who really only use Gmail or Google Docs, or even YouTube, are now ‘members’ of Google+.  What does that tell us about engagement, though?  Not much.”

He’s got a point.  Anytime a non-Google+ member using any of Google’s other services signed on in recent months, they’ve been tempted by the invitation to sign up for Google +.  How many people, exposed to such blatant fanfare, do you suppose actually resisted?  Wouldn’t human curiosity get the better of anyone?  I know several people for whom this was precisely the case.  They have signed up, yes, but are they using Google +, really?

One Google official blogger went on the record yesterday claiming that engagement has increased right along with new sign-ups, and that people are interacting, forming circles, and posting regularly to their profiles.  Personally, I am still waiting for the remaining 96.8 % of my Facebook friends to give Google + even a second glance.  Time will tell.