The little social network that could
Paul Allen, unofficial Google+ statistician and Ancestry.com founder is well recognized as the voice of authority on all things Google+. Allen announced that he has changed his model for analyzing Google’s social network and says that Google+ is now up to roughly 43.4 million users with one in three having signed up in the first two days after the site was opened to the public. Allen is expected to announce this week further details as to Google’s growth, saying today that Google+ may have already hig the 50 million user mark in the first week open to the public, despite some speculation that the site would flop.
According to Experian, Google+ is now the third largest site in the Social Network category and that “Opening access created a massive spike in market share of visits for the site, with a 1269% growth from the week ending September 17th to the week of September 24th. The site also received nearly 15 million total US visits last week.”
“Google is a company that has had the incredible discipline for more than a decade to use a very simple, minimalist design on its home page along with a long search box to encourage longer queries,” said Allen. “Changes to home page links are very infrequent. The popularity of its home page never led Google to turn itself into a portal, with hundreds of links and a few lucrative ads. Given that discipline, I think the tens of millions of people who will be signing up for and using Google+ will find that changes here will be very well thought out, very iterative, very carefully tested, and won’t be nearly as jarring as the changes that have been made at other social networks. Google is not in a rush to change the world. They are on a steady course to do so.”
