14 DAY TRIAL // Along with its financial details, Google also provided some updated numbers on Google+ adoption. User numbers are increasing, as expected. In fact, Google announced that there are now 90 million "users," though it did not offer any definition for the term.
Most likely, Google is talking about registered users, an important metric, but not the most relevant. Much more important is the number of users that actually come back and use the site regularly.
For the first time, Google, CEO Larry Page to be exact, provided some numbers on that, but they're more than a bit misleading. Page said that 60 percent engage daily and 80 percent of users engage weekly, but he was referring to Google+ users that visited any Google site, not Google+ in particular.
If those users visited Google+ at this rate, the site would be the envy of the social networking world, Facebook only manages to get to 60 percent daily active users at most, but that's a site closing in on one billion monthly active users.
Still, 90 million people have created a Google+ profile in just half a year after launch. Those are stats that any site out there would kill for. At this rate, Google+ will be hitting 100 million users next month.
What's the most remarkable is that the numbers don't really come as a surprise, entrepreneur Paul Allen has been tracking growth since the site got going and he has been very accurate so far.
At the end of December, he said Google+ would close the year with 65 million users. He also said that about 625,000 people were joining the site each day.
At that rate, the site should have close to 80 million users at this point, so either the growth rate picked up during January or his estimates were too small to begin with. Likely, it's a combination of the two.