Google+ Has 50 Million Users: Report

Does Google+ have 50 million users? At least one person is reporting that the fledgling social network has 50 million users, up from a mere 10 million in July.

Meanwhile, Paul Allen, the Ancestry.com founder who has become an unofficial statistician for Google+, estimates the number of people worldwide who have joined at about 50 million, with the social network adding about 2 million members a day.

Google declined to comment on Google+'s actual numbers. Its last official comment was in July when chief executive Larry Page announced the 10 million marker. That leaves us only with Allen, who seems to come up with his statistics from a formula involving name databases and magic beans. We don't know if we would put a lot of stock into what he writes, but his estimate might not be that far off.

After all, Google+ opened up its network to the public last week and its traffic rose more than 1,000 percent, just trailing behind social network dinosaur MySpace and LinkedIn. That's not bad for a three-month-old Web property. Also, 50 million may seem like a lot of users, but when compared to Facebook's 750 million users it shows how far the young social network still has to go.

If Google is serious about Google+, it has to get more visibility, including having its own employees use the network. As we reported last week, if Google's own executive team isn't using Google+, what hope does it have of succeeding with the public?

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