Google+ created yet another record by becoming the fastest social network to reach 170 million users. Less than nine and a half months have passed since the “closed beta” launch of the social network on June 28, 2011. As for the public “open registrations” launch, it has been less than seven months since that took place. So, the pace at which Google+ has grown is incredible. Senior Vice-President of Social Business for Google, Vic Gundotra confirmed that “more than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+” in a post at the official Google blog recently.
To give a good idea of the growth, Facebook took more than 1500 days or in other words more than four years to reach the 170 million users mark. Twitter took nearly 1096 days to reach only the 50 million mark while Myspace took around 1046 days to reach the 50 million users mark. On other hand, it is less than 290 days since the first beta launch of Google plus and it has already crossed the mark. So, Google+ is definitely far ahead of the rest in terms of the initial rate of growth of the social network. However, the numbers also clarify that the growth has stabilized a bit in the last few months after the initial frenzy when it had crossed 25 million users in less than a month and 50 million users in less than 3 months.
The good part is that Google+ is continuously improving and adding new features to the social network to keep up with the competition. They have also been advertising the social network somewhat aggressively both online and offline. But some critics also argue that Google+ has kept the engagement time and daily activity of users in the social network somewhat secretive as they might not be doing too well on that end. It would need to be seen how the Google+ growth moves in the near future. Signs are good as of now but it definitely has some tough competition ahead with the other social networks also adding new features quite regularly ever since the entry of Google+. However, it has to to be kept in mind that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter took upto 6-7 years to reach their present stature. So, it is quite early to conclude anything and it is quite possible that Google+ might be as big as the other two if not bigger in the long run.
