Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Whither Google+? Approaching 50M Users, but Not Being Mentioned in the Same Breath as Facebook Anymore.

As of Sept. 22, the same day Facebook offered its latest vision for the social Web, Google+ had 43.4 million users, with 30 percent growth over two days previous, according to Allen. (Allen counts profiles by searching for a set of 400 uncommon surnames, and now inflates his estimate by 15 percent to account for private accounts and names that don’t include Roman characters.)

That recorded growth explosion is most likely due to a combination of Google+ opening up to the public and getting its first real marketing last week — which included an animated arrow on the massively trafficked Google.com homepage to entice Google search users to sign up.

Any Web start-up would kill for user stats that include both 30 percent growth in two days and tens of millions of people, but success for Google+ would mean becoming a much more mainstream product than it is today.

Consider the context. Competitive pressures without a doubt contributed to some recent Facebook feature launches, but Mark Zuckerberg and company successfully exorcised their Googley demons at f8, where the new Timeline self-expression features and Open Graph auto-sharing tools were announced.

Google+ wasn’t even mentioned once at the press conference following Zuckerberg’s keynote — which was a stunning omission, given the recent tech punditry focus on the Google-Facebook war.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

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