For a service that is barely two weeks old, and still in the Beta stage to boot, Google+ has made a remarkable impact. And, Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt has us believe that the extent of the impact is millions of users. How many millions? That is not yet clear.
Speaking to reporters last week in Idaho, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said Google is pleased with the early response to Plus and is planning to use its core identity and “circles” features across Google products.
“The current inclination of the company,” Schmidt said, “is to invest heavily … we test stuff and, when it works, we put a lot more emphasis on it. So, Google+ – all the signs are very positive, so now the whole company is ramping up on top of it.”
Schmidt was non-committal about a lot of specifics, but he made repeated references to Google+ being used to power and improve other Google products. Consider these three quotes:
As we move our stuff onto what you think of as Google+, there’s a nice set of product improvements in core search, YouTube, maps, and so forth, which should drive adoption.
We’re trying to use the identity infrastructure to make Google products really interesting. Imagine all of those properties adopting the circles metaphor – Buzz adopting it, Gmail adopting it.
The assumption is that as it grows and ramps up, everything will move over to using the + infrastructure.
Schmidt said that he’s pleased with two particular aspects of the Google+ launch: One, that many people have been unhappy about not having an invite and, two, that many users seem to understand how it differs from Facebook.
This statement is backed by what happened on Saturday. On Saturday, Google started spamming G+ email in-boxes with a flood of email notifications. Giving an explanation, Vic Gundotra, Google Senior VP of Social, said, “For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. We didn’t expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have. Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of ZDNet reacted, on Sunday, “That’s a pretty mind-boggling admission. Google? Google!? Running out of disk space? Amazing! So, how many users would it take to run G+ out of disk room anyway? It must have been a bunch, but, for now, we don’t know how many uses G+ already has.”
Negating the theory that Google has been creating G+ hype with an artificial shortage of G+ invites, that Google could let the world in if they wanted to,Vaughan-Nichols said, ” I disagree. After all, would Google have let G+ go briefly haywire over the weekend if they really had the resources to keep everyone happy? I don’t think so.”
Jason Hiner, the editor-in-chief of TechRepublic, suggests, based on data collected by Mohamed Mansour, who created a tool to import Facebook friends information to Google, that G+ already had reached one million users.
Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, a leading genealogy site, suggests, based on his research that G+ may already be closing in on 5-million users. By his preliminary calculations, Allen thinks in G+’s first full week the new social network is growing at a rate of 280%.
Vaughan-Nichols concludes, “Perhaps the more interesting question though isn’t how big G+ is now, it’s “How big will G+ get?” On July 6th, Facebook claimed to have 750-million users. I wonder, I really do, if by this time next year G+ will have overtaken Facebook. I’m quite serious. G+ is that good.”