Google+ almost 20,000,000 users in 3 weeks

While Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner feels that people don't have time in their schedule for Google+, it appears that initial reports are very positive for Google's latest social networking platform.

Reports show that the growth of Google+ is very strong, with the adoption rate almost reaching 20 million users within a space of three weeks, after launch.

Paul Allen from Ancestry.com said yesterday that his calculations show that the site had reached 18 million users and was continuing to grow at a rate of 750,000 people each day.

Allen said his methodology for tracking isn't based on internal data. “I don't have access to log files or to a massive consumer panel. I'm simply measuring how many Google+ users there are of various randomly selected surnames every day. Last week I increased the sample of surnames that I query from 100 to 1,000.

“Over a four-day period, the 100-surname sample showed a Google+ growth rate of 28.4%. The 1,000 surname sample showed a growth rate of 28.5%. [That's] statistically insignificant. So I'm not sure whether to keep running 1,000 surname queries per day or just stick with 100. Yesterday, the number of users with the 1,000 surnames jumped from 23,922 (all counted by hand) to 24,990, for an increase of 4.47%. I tried to get the count a full day after the original count, but there is no way to make sure that my data entry team can time it exactly right. The counts could be off by several hours, cutting into the accuracy.”

Google+ was released for the iPhone this week and is already the top free app on the Apple App Store.

Allen said “”Google hasn't started marketing Google+ through any of its other channels yet. More than a billion people worldwide use Google products, including its top rated search engine, YouTube, and Blogger. Chairman Eric Schmidt says the vision is to integrate Circles and sharing with all the other Google properties. When that happens, you will likely see millions of people joining Google+ every day for some period of time.”

Google's CEO Larry Page has said the growth is great, especially after the record profits and revenue figures which were published last week.

In other news, Google have killed Google Labs, a trial area in which beta products were released so people could try them out and offer feedback before the company decided to move forward. The removal of this is to “prioritize product efforts.”

Kitguru says: Google+ looking to be a success story already, even after only 3 weeks in the wild.

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