Google’s latest social networking venture, Google+, has proven wildly popular. One estimate by Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen pegs the service at 9.5 million users as of Tuesday morning. By the end of the day, he believes the service will reach 10 million users — and then some.
By cross-referencing surname popularity (courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau) with 100-200 sample surnames of U.S. users, Allen calculates the total percentage of the U.S. population registered on Google+. Then, he examines the ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. users — one U.S. to 2.12 international users, as of July 4 — to generate a worldwide user estimate.
His calculations, if accurate, have revealed some staggering statistics. Google+ had roughly 1.7 million users on July 4. By July 10, that number had grown to 4.5 million. Following an exponential growth curve, about 2.2 million people have joined Google+ over the last 32-34 hours. At that rate, the service could reach 20 million this weekend, speculates Allen.
Facebook, which launched as a school-based social network in February 2004, reached one million active users in under a year by catering to a select few universities. By December 2006, Facebook had more than 12 million active users — two years before it became available to the general public.
Google+ remains a beta; you must have an invite from an existing user to join the service. If Google+ launched without this restriction, it would have demonstrated even more monumental growth — probably crashing Google's servers in the process. Exact figures are not known, and a Google representative declined to comment on Allen's estimates.
After the missteps that were Google Buzz and Google Wave, Google executives must be thrilled with Google+’s early success. And with employee bonuses linked to "getting social," we’d imagine there are some very happy Googlers out there, too.
Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross recently asserted that Google+ will reach 100 million users faster than any other service in history. If Google continues to allow ‘+’ invites to flow freely, he may very well be correct.
See Also: - Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social
