Google+ growth

The chart below shows impressive growth numbers for Google+ — although I don’t know what it really means at this point, if anything. Could be a lot of people are just looking for an alternative to Facebook, but 10 million is a pretty big user base in just a couple of weeks time.

I joined G+ this week and have been poking around a little, mostly out of curiosity to see what they’ve built and how the technology works. I never used Facebook and I don’t know if G+ will be any different, but they are doing some interesting things there with the ‘Circles’ model of security and permissions. You can see the Circles concept demonstrated in a YouTube video here.

Watching the developments with Facebook and Google+ I wonder if a single platform needs to “win” this game or if several different ones will find their own audience and grow independently of one another—if so, what if some of your friends or family are on one network but not the other? Maybe some form of integration among the networks will evolve. I don’t imagine the principal players will want to go along with that but it might be an opportunity for a third party middleware service to do something.

Chart came from this Betabeat article.

Posted: July 22nd, 2011
Filed under: Free (or low-cost), Innovation, Security & Privacy, Social Networking, Web-based Tags: google, google plus, web-apps | No Comments »

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