There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats, particularly the "active users" one.<p>To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet. There may be at most a few people who occasionally post to it, and recently I've seen many switch to Twitter.<p>Secondly, although not a perfect proxy, Google Trends shows an exponentially decaying trend that is hardly in line with their reported exponential growth:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c...</a><p>Here's a zoomed-in graph in the last 12 months clearly showing the decaying tail:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c...</a><p>Let's compare for example with Twitter (~140-200M actives) in the last 12 months:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit...</a><p>Regardless of how you rationalize people searching for "twitter" vs. "google plus" as a proxy for active users, the decaying trend is clear. And it's hard to think of why the query "google plus" or "google+" would be 50-70 times less popular than "twitter" other than low the popularity of the service.<p>Of course none of this is hard proof, and it's possible that my circles are just not representative of the internet as a whole and that Google Trends is a fantastically erroneous proxy for popularity, but personally I believe they're using an unrealistically optimistic metric for actives.
Is there detailed information about what counts as a Google+ MAU? It's not totally clear what they are counting and how much of them are true MAUs of the social network versus people who have Google accounts who somehow interacted with something Google+ related while signed into Gmail (e.g. accidentally clicked on a +1 next to a search result, or the notifications in the black bar).<p>I'm a Google+ MAU, since I'm usually signed into my Google account, and occasionally read blog posts on Google+. I'm a Google+ MAU in the same way as I'm a MAU of plenty of other blog hosting sites. I don't use it as a social network.<p>I think more detailed engagement numbers would tell the true story.
Yeah yeah, I'm an "active" G+ user, but all I've done in the past month is have my photos from my phone automatically uploaded to it (not shared, just for backup), and maybe shared a couple of things I saw on Google Reader, that nobody will likely see, because, well, google broke readers social interface.
Even with this G+ looks like a social service for IT-related people. A lot of programmers I know use G+.<p>But other people prefer to stay with those social services where the most of their friends are. So happened it is not G+ but Facebook and other (e.g. VKontakte).<p>Just noticed.
Could it possibly be that they count users of Youtube/Google Drive and other Google products as "active" Google Plus users? Something must indeed be deceptive about these stats.
Those are nice numbers, but how is engagement?<p>I only visit Google+ because my admin didn't bother to block it, but nobody in my social circle uses it, so I only have it to follow some funny pictures, lifehacker and stuff (kind of a RSS feed).<p>Reminds me of Hotmail, which I check once a month or so, much like many people I know which still has an account, but I'm sure Microsoft counts me as "active", compared to Gmail which I check a zillion times a day.
You're automatically signed up for Google+ when you create a Gmail account now, or at least I was last week. I was annoyed. I had to manually turn it off. You don't just slap my name on the public internet without asking me, Google.<p>I thought they'd learned a lesson about this kind of behavior from Buzz.
Google+ does have one killer feature: easy videoconferencing. It has very much changed the way our remote team works with our client.<p>As a "status update" social network (in the FB, Twitter, MySpace), I'm not sure that Google+ is going to change the world, but as a set of communication tools, it might end up being what Wave always wanted to be.
Im interested in knowing ehat googlr considers an `active use. the google plus screen is integrated with their ecosystem but i dont know much who actively use it.
Anyone who buys into the "G+ is a ghost town propped up by Gmail and Android numbers" theory will note that they literally just announced 500 million Android activations a few days ago. And you'd expect a good number of users are buying their second android phone.