Back-of-the-envelope maths by entrepreneur and founder of Ancestry.com Paul Allen suggests that Google’s new social network Google+ had 1.7m users worldwide after just one week. Launched on June 28thto a limited group of users, Google+ proved so popular that invitations to new users had to be temporarily limited.
Allen estimated Google+’s popularity by counting the number of users with a given surname, e.g. Cooke and comparing that number to the total number of Cookes in the US to produce the percentage of Cookes on Google+. Multiplying this by the total US population gives a rough figure for how many users are on Google+. He repeated that calculation with 79 other rare surnames to verify the result.
Allen’s results indicate that by July 4th, there were “515,933 users in the U.S, and 1,226,136 outside the US for a total of 1,742,069 users”. Google itself has not provided any official statistics for the popularity of Google+.
Competing head-to-head with Facebook (500m users) and Twitter (200m users), Google+ has a long way to go before it catches up. Tight integration with other Google products such as GMail and Google Documents via the newly reworked Google navigation bar means that this rapid adoption is likely to continue. Users are already hoping to see Google+ working seamlessly with Translate and Reader, which would ensure that the fledgling social network continues to expand.
For website owners, Google+ is already a valuable source of traffic, with TechCrunch reporting that it is already in their top ten referrers:
Well, since its launch last Tuesday, Google+ has already cracked our top ten referring sites. It currently resides just behind Digg in that timespan. If you narrow that down to just count July so far (a few days after launch, so more users had time to sign up), the numbers are even better. It would already be the number seven referrer, just behind Hacker News. And it’s already a fifth as large as the leading social referrer, facebook.com.
Even without its heft, Google+ is already giving Facebook a run for its money. But it’s not just other social networking sites that should worry. Google+’s video conferencing feature, Hangout, takes on the voice-over-IP incumbents like Skype or Ribbit. Skype, recently bought by Microsoft, has begun surveying users about call quality after every call, so is clearly concerned about the issue. If Google+ can provide a more reliable, higher quality experience, users will defect.
It’s a little too early after only a week to read the tealeaves, but rumours that Google has ideas about adding games and Q&As show that Google+ certainly has ambition. Google has never been a shrinking violet and in one fell swoop, Google+ has made a strong entry into several profitable markets.
