14 DAY TRIAL // Google+, whether you love it or hate it, is hard to ignore. Granted, there are those that call it a ghost town, yet the social network certainly doesn't just fade away into the background, if only because Google is behind it.
For all the criticism, Google+ is only a few months old, gaining on a year, Vic Gundotra, one of the two people in charge of Google+, told the audience in an interview at SXSW.
Not only is just getting started, it's also different from anything you've seen before, Google would have you believe. It's not a new social network but a new Google, Google 2.0 which knows more about you and is all the better for it.
As such, looking at things like how much time people spend on Google+, how much they share publicly and so on, aren't relevant. Google+ is always "on" if you're using Google and have signed up for the social network, Gundotra said.
He reiterated some recent numbers, 50 million people using Google+ daily, 100 million at least once per month. It's important to note that these are people using any Google service, YouTube and so on, which is "optimized" for Google+.
That could mean virtually any Google site that has a Google+ share box. Gundotra still didn't make it clear what "active" meant, whether users had to interact with a Google+ feature, even if it's off site, or whether a site surfacing Google+ content automatically, like YouTube, was enough.
The question of the API came up again. Gundotra took full responsibility for not having an API at launch. He says that there's still no hurry for an API. He says he doesn't want to put out an API and then have to go back on it, a reference to Twitter, or to have your stream filled with stuff from third-party apps, a reference to Facebook.