Okay Geek Farm
Google + membership rises 30% in two days after Facebook changes
Ricardo Trejo
In what undoubtedly is a response to the changes being currently implemented to Facebook, users have begun flocking away from the social media giant and heading for calmer waters. And y’know what? It would seem that Google + is the place where a lot of these people have landed, increasing the service’s now public membership about 30%.
According to Paul Allen, ancestry.com’s founder and also, apparent unofficial Google statistician, Google +’s membership has seen a huge boost within the past few days — likely due to the aforementioned Facebook improvements. His post mentions the following:
Here are my latest estimates:
On September 9, our model showed 28.7 million users
This morning, our model shows 37.8 million users, with most of the growth coming in the last 2 days
By adding a fudge factor (see below) to account for private user profiles and for non-Roman surnames (both of which are totally overlooked by our surname counting model), my current estimate is 43.4 million users
The timing on Google+ opening up to the public is interesting. Facebook has made a ton of UI changes this week and is holding it’s F8 Developers Conference today - in fact it is just staring now. According to a survey this week by Mashable, 72.2% of Facebook users hate the recent UI changes, including the News Feed redesign. Twitter’s stream was filled with complaints yesterday about Facebook under the hashtag #newfacebook.”
He didn’t end there though. He went on to plug Google’s continued efforts in keeping things simple and unchanged, something that Facebook, as a young company, doesn’t yet have the discipline that the big G does:
“Google is a company that has had the incredible discipline for more than a decade to use a very simple, minimalist design on its home page along with a long search box to encourage longer queries. Changes to home page links are very infrequent. The popularity of its home page never led Google to turn itself into a portal, with hundreds of links and a few lucrative ads. Given that discipline, I think the tens of millions of people who will be signing up for and using Google+ will find that changes here will be very well thought out, very iterative, very carefully tested, and won’t be nearly as jarring as the changes that have been made at other social networks. Google is not in a rush to change the world. They are on a steady course to do so.”
While Google may now have over 40 million users it still has a long way to go to catch up the 800 million strong that continue to make Facebook the giant it’s become. Again, “you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” — Zuckerberg can tell you that.
