

20 Million Google+ Users May Exist by the Weekend - joejohnson
http://www.pcworld.com/article/235468/20_million_google_users_may_exist_by_the_weekend.html

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localhost3000
I've already noticed that my Google+ feed is becoming dominated by posts along
the lines of "Why am I still using this? FB is the same and all of my friends
are there"

I expect them to have a fair bit of churn once the novelty wears off and all
the invites stop hitting people's inbox

 _edit: I have a lot of non-techie friends not in the early-adopter crowd (who
I invited) so I expect, for them, it feels pretty empty. For people who read
HN, it's likely much more vibrant. Ultimately, it's the mainstream that
matters and, until it hits critical mass, I believe the people we pull in from
the mainstream won't see the point and will go back to FB where their news
feed is always full._

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btilly
We must have different social circles then. I've yet to see any messages along
that line in my feed.

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alexgaribay
I would have to agree with that. The initial posts in my circles are about how
they love G+.

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MikeCapone
Same for me. 95% positive.

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zacman85
Is there any historical evidence that a meteoric rise in traffic, of this
magnitude, has translated into a long term success? I am not making any
prediction on Google+'s future; I am just interested if there are examples
that I am not able to recall.

Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare had to earn their traffic along the way. The
evolutionary process of going from 100K users to 750M users must be an
important component in their success.

If these statistics for Google+ are correct, they seem to be leap-frogging the
entire process that happens when growing your user base from nothing to
something. I cannot decide if this is a benefit or a detriment to the eventual
success of the product. I would love to hear examples or counter-examples of
this.

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dekayed
I feel like G+'s success is related to Facebook's past success. Ever since G+
came out, I've seen many posts on my FB feed for people giving out and wanting
G+ invites. The me-too mentality inherent in FB (and other social networking
sites) means that people will want to join whatever site their friends are on.
That being said, it will be interesting to see if G+ can keep these people
around or if it is going to just be a passing fad.

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revorad
So now the same back of the envelope calculation by Paul Allen will keep on
getting rehashed as a breaking news story by every single tech site out there.

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alextingle
Google _require_ that new users give them a valid phone number, and they phone
you up to check you're not cheating.

That's way more intrusive than anything Facebook has ever done. My wife just
flat-out refused to countenance the idea - so G+ lasted about 1 hour in my
household.

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ZoFreX
I find it absolutely unacceptable that so many companies, under the guise of
protecting your important data, insist that you give them your important data.

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mbrzuzy
Right now everyone is signing up just to check it out. Let's wait and see what
the active user count is in a couple months.

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melvinng
It's almost 2% of the users Facebook has.

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badclient
And engagement? All I know is in early days of fb I remember vast majority of
people in large lecture halls being glued to fb.

I don't see remotely that type o of engagement with g+.

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afterburner
Facebook was most peoples' introduction to social sites, that accounted for a
lot of the simultaneous fascination. I don't see it as a strike against
Google+ that it won't achieve the same encounter with novelty.

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Eurofooty
...and I'm still not one of them! :(

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braga
I'm almost going out and sitting on the sidewalk with a sign: "will code for a
Google+ invite".

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marcf
I believe you can just sign up now...

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braga
That's great :)

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reso
Am I mistaken, or can Google "turn on" G+ for any google account, and have
that count as a G+ user? It doesn't seem like these numbers are very
meaningful. We need monthly-actives to accurately compare to Facebook.

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ugh
They don’t though. You currently explicitly have to sign up for it.

I’m not even sure whether you can currently just sign up, I think you still
have to invited (and it’s not enough to just be invited to count as a user,
the invited person needs to explicitly sign up).

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newobj
Let's talk about DAU then I'll be impressed.

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bonch
Buzz also had millions of users.

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jlouis
Buzz was much more forced upon people though than this is.

