14 DAY TRIAL // There's been a lot of speculation about Google+'s size. It seemed to be growing very fast, even with limited invites and availability, and some estimates put user numbers at 10 million this week. We now have the first official numbers, coming from CEO Larry Page no less, which confirm that the social network does indeed have 10 million users at this point.
"Google+ is still only in field trial with limited access as we scale the system. Users have to be invited, sign up with a profile in order to use it," Larry Page said in the earnings call after the announcement of the second quarter financial results.
"However, the growth on Google+ has been great--and I’m excited to release some new metrics for you today. Over 10M people have joined Google+. Great achievement for the team," Page said.
While the numbers are still small, this is only two weeks after Google+ became available. It's clear by now that Google+ is the company's biggest success in the social web to date, Orkut notwithstanding.
Google acquired Orkut, homegrown projects, like Google Buzz were a fiasco. That's not to say that Google+ is guaranteed a success, but it's certainly on the right path.
More important than user numbers though is whether those users stick around and have anything to do after they've created an account. Apparently, Google+ is seeing a lot of action as well.
"There’s also a ton of activity. We are seeing over 1 billion items shared and received in a single day. Our +1 button is already all over the web. It’s being served 2.3 billion times a day," Page said on his notes from the earnings call, posted on Google+.
Google is said to be aiming to launch Google+ publicly by the end of the month. It may have managed to get some hype and the limited invites got people to want to get in even more, the real test will be whether Google+ will continue to grow once the hype dies down and the early adopter crowd settles down.