14 DAY TRIAL // Early after Google+ launched, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, joined the site. This was quite a big event, though he didn't think much of it. But people were curious what Zuckerberg would say about Google+ - he actually hasn't said anything on the site - so he became the most followed person on Google+.
He continued to rack up followers. At the same time, top ranking Google execs, including the two founders, were also getting tens of thousands of followers.
This provided an entertaining race, but also an idea on how many people were using the social network and how fast it grew.
Suddenly though, the most popular users in the top 100 Google+ users fell of the radar after they activated a privacy option which blocks the world from seeing who is in their circles and who has added them to their circles.
This includes Mark Zuckerberg and virtually all Google execs that had a large following. As such, the freshly minted Google+ top 100 users at SocialStatistics.com got an overnight revamp.
At this moment, the well-known blogger Robert Scoble is the most popular user on Google+, with some 43,000 people following him. He is followed by Leo Raporte, another tech journalist, with almost 43,000 followers, then by Kevin Rose, the founder and former CEO of Digg.
The actress and all round geek icon Felicia Day is fourth and MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson is fifth. Some people do enjoy their privacy, even if they're the most popular users on Google+, so this will have a big effect on the accuracy of any top relying on publicly available data.
Twitter users can't hide their follower numbers, emphasizing the site's more public nature. Google+ does actually borrow quite a lot of things from Twitter, but the mix of Facebook and Twitter features does get confusing at times. The fact that Google is emphasizing privacy also has an effect on its ability to compete with Twitter.