Paul Allen, the well known “unofficial Google Plus statistician” and founder of Ancestry.com is reporting that Google Plus has reached 18 million users making it the fastest growing social network in history. Although growth has subsided from its early boom, in a short time, Google Plus has as many people as the entire combined population of Chile.
Google critics point out that Google Plus’ size is still only 2.4% of the size of Facebook while supporters note that the current size of Google Plus is astronomical based on how long it has been around.
Further, Allen reports that Google Plus has been dominated by male users but that women are catching up rapidly, conflicting with reports that contradict Allen’s report, and he notes previous reports are “flawed.” Currently, Allen says that 66.4% of users are male and 33.6% female.
Google Plus has announced they will soon be making gender an optional choice in profile pages not only out of respect for modern gender issues, but for privacy. We believe, however, that based on user behavior, Google will still profile users and segment them based on demographics to feed their advertising platform.
If the current rate of growth continued at approximately 763,000 new users every day, Google Plus would only take four to five months to reach 100 million users, putting them squarely against Facebook and Twitter.
By default, Google has always undone the progress of companies that provide similar offerings and sometimes they run parallel (like Google Docs versus Microsoft Office) while others are supplanted by Google (for example, Google Plus is now believed to be capable of supplanting Skype).
Google is in growth mode and there is no question that their current moves are making waves and threatening companies in the technology sector, regardless of whether or not Google has set their sights on those companies.
This article published on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 12:11 am | Contact the editor Tags: featured, google, google plusCategory: New Media
Tara Steele is the News Director at AgentGenius, covering real estate news, technology news and everything in between. If you’d like to reach Tara with a question, comment, press release or hot news tip, she frequently checks her email, simply click the link below.
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