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Google+ membership now estimated at 43 million


Since opening its doors to the public, Google’s upcoming social network Google+ has seen a 30-percent growth in membership, a statistician said. Paul Allen, founder of genealogy site Ancestry.com, noted the 30-percent increase in users in two days since Google+ went into beta last week and dropped the requirement for an invitation. “In the past couple of days, since Google opened its doors to the general public over age 18, the growth rate has skyrocketed to rates we only saw during the first week of its ‘field test’ - back when it had a small number of users to begin with, the growth rates were of course much higher. But when I checked the data this morning, it is clear that Google+ is absolutely exploding - 30% growth in just 2 days and with a base of nearly 30 million members already," he said in a post on his Google+ account. Accounting for private user profiles and for non-Roman surnames, he said his current estimate is 43.4 million users. He also said his sampling of 400 uncommon surnames in the U.S. also reflects usage in many other countries, since the list of 400 includes names that are popular in India, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and many other countries. Allen said the timing on Google+ opening up to the public is interesting, coming at a time Facebook made a ton of interface changes this week and is holding its F8 Developers Conference. Citing a survey by Mashable, he noted 72.2 percent of Facebook users hate the recent UI changes, including the News Feed redesign. “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," he added. — TJD, GMA News

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