14 DAY TRIAL // There are still plenty of questions left about the fate and future of Google+. But, so far, the social network has done a good job at getting users to sign up, more so than any other similar attempt by Google, or by anyone else for that matter.
The latest unofficial user numbers peg Google+ at 62 million users, just after Christmas. It should end the year with about 65 million users, not bad for a service launched roughly half a year ago.
"Google+ is adding new users at a very rapid pace," Paul Allen, unofficial Google+ user number announcer, wrote.
"It may be the holidays, the TV commercials, the Android 4 signups, celebrity and brand appeal, or positive word of mouth, or a combination of all these factors, but there is no question that the number of new users signing up for Google+ each day has accelerated markedly in the past several weeks," he said.
Allen has been tracking Google+ growth since launch. Along with his team, he uses a method of determining Google+'s user number with the help of uncommon surnames. Based on census data, he is able to determine what percentage of the US population has signed up for the site.
So far, his predictions have been very accurate, predicting both when Google+ might hit 10 million users as well as 40 million users, the latest official figure.
His latest numbers indicate that almost a quarter of Google+ users have registered in the last month, 625,000 per day. If this trend continues, Google+ will have 100 million users by the end of February next year and 200 million at the start of August.
Google+ will end 2012 with almost 300 million users, the prediction is. Of course, it's hard to peek that far into the future. On the one hand, user growth may continue to accelerate, on the other, interest may level off.