Google+ approaching 20m users in less than three weeks, analysis shows

Search engine's social network growing by leaps and bounds, and has enormous potential for expansion

Google+ growth chart by Paul Allen: heading towards 20m

Google+, the social networking product from the search engine giant, is heading for 20m users within the next few days just three weeks after its launch, according to calculations.

Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, said on Wednesday that his model which calculates its growth by the prevalence of surnames,indicates that by last Monday the site had hit 18m users and was growing at 750,000 per day.

The Google+ app for the iPhone, which was released earlier in the week, was the top free app on Apple's iTunes Store.

Allen said that the rate of growth has slowed slightly since last week, when there were a million people joining per day.

Google+, which is built as a social network that uses the idea of "Circles" - user-generated groups of people with whom to communicate. The idea is, like Twitter, to allow a wider social group than can be created on Facebook, without the need for reciprocity that its "friends" system requires, while letting people post at length rather than Twitter's 140-character limit.

Allen says that the potential for growth is enormous: "Google hasn't started marketing Google+ through any of its other channels yet. More than a billion people worldwide use Google products, including its top rated search engine, YouTube, and Blogger. Chairman Eric Schmidt says the vision is to integrate Circles and sharing with all the other Google properties. When that happens, you will likely see millions of people joining Google+ every day for some period of time."

Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, expressed delight with the growth of the service following the company's record profits and revenues last week. At the time he said that Google+ had passed 10m users. Allen says that his own model at the time showed 13m users, indicating that it is probably broadly accurate.

Allen explains his methods: "I don't have access to log files or to a massive consumer panel. I'm simply measuring how many Google+ users there are of various randomly selected surnames every day. Last week I increased the sample of surnames that I query from 100 to 1,000.

"Over a four-day period, the 100-surname sample showed a Google+ growth rate of 28.4%. The 1,000 surname sample showed a growth rate of 28.5%. [That's] statistically insignificant. So I'm not sure whether to keep running 1,000 surname queries per day or just stick with 100. Yesterday, the number of users with the 1,000 surnames jumped from 23,922 (all counted by hand) to 24,990, for an increase of 4.47%. I tried to get the count a full day after the original count, but there is no way to make sure that my data entry team can time it exactly right. The counts could be off by several hours, cutting into the accuracy."

• Meanwhile, Google is killing off Google Labs, its experimental area where it released potential products to see how users liked them.

The move is part of a refocus on tighter product releases, and away from the sometimes haphazard approach to releasing its software.

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Google+ meets with early success

f not for Google's (GOOG) first three flops at social networking, the search giant might never have come up with a viable challenge to Facebook andTwitter.

Google's fourth and most ambitious attempt at social networking has set Silicon Valley abuzz, with membership soaring past 10 million people in just three weeks. Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, the two executives in charge of Google+, said in an extended interview that they closely studied Google's previous failures with Orkut, Wave and Buzz to find a better approach. They also found a close-knit team of engineers and designers willing to take a risk.

Google+ ranks as one of the most important product launches in the company's history as it tries to catch up with the booming success of 750 million-member Facebook and other social sites, and the threat they represent to Google's advertising business. Google+ is the centerpiece of a companywide master plan to reboot Google for a modern Web that is increasingly about connecting with people as well as information.

Although the numbers for Google+ are impressive, Gundotra and Horowitz said it's far too soon to declare Google+ a winner. "We're Google. We can get anybody

to kick the tires of a product," said Gundotra, the Internet giant's top social networking executive. "It doesn't mean it's going to be successful."

Sitting in Building 2000 on the Googleplex, where they assembled the team in June 2010 to build Google+, the two executives talked about the leap of faith they made, and the team of engineers and designers that built the network.

"We've got some great characters here," Gundotra said. "Good people who are jelling together as a team. I think that's a part of the story that has never been told. People don't get how magical this team is. How we came together in the course of the past year to become friends.

"We're a heated team, a passionate team, lots of good fights, but it's a team that is pretty amazing."

Experts agree it's too early to call the social network a hit, even though its popularity helped push Google stock up 13 percent last week. Indeed, Facebook added 250 million members in the year Google+ was being designed. "Until it really starts to go mainstream, and I see my cousin in Florida decide to get on it, I just don't think we can say it's a success. We've got a ways to go," said Michael Fauscette, an analyst with IDC.

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