14 DAY TRIAL // Talk of Google+ failing or slowing down has been inevitable. True to the remarkably accurate "Technology hype curve," after the early excitement comes disillusionment. But only after that comes the real growth and the adoption of a technology by mainstream users.
Of course, Google+ is not a new technology, so perhaps there are some differences, but so far the hype around it has been following the theoretical curve pretty neatly.
This is why it's perhaps best not to look at what early adopters are saying or doing, but to look at actual signs of how healthy the social network is.
A simple way of gauging Google+'s success and popularity is by the popularity of some of its best know users.
Very recently, Britney Spears, who had been enjoying the title of most followed person on Google+, broke through the one million follower mark and now has some one million 43 thousand people subscribing to her updates.
By contrast, Larry Page, the very well known CEO of Google, who led the popularity chart for a while, after overtaking Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Arch-enemy Facebook, is left with just 930,000 or so people following him on Google+.
Of course, people subscribing to some user is not the same as people using Google+ regularly, but it's still an important metric.
And the fact that Britney Spears is the most popular user on the site signals perhaps that mainstream users are increasingly at home on Google+. That's definitely not to say that Google+ is a mainstream success or that it will continue to grow at this rate, but it's a good sign.
It really is to early to tell whether Google+ will be successful on the scale Google wants it to be. It may never get close to Facebook in terms of user numbers and it may not even challenge Twitter. But so far, it's fair to say that Google+ has been performing above Google's and everyone else's expectations.