Yesterday, one person in my ‘friends circle’ of Google+ re-posted the graphic below. It’s about the initial-instant growth of Google+, as compared with Facebook and Twitter.
Of course, the graphic does not tell the full story for at least 2 main reasons:
1) With online social networking becoming a huge thing in the past decade, and especially in the past few years, people were very attracted to try out a new social network like Google+. See how Twitter reached 10,000,000 users almost a full 2 and a half months before Facebook. It’s because Twitter came along later in the whole social networking game, once the craze had already begun. The same with Google+. It came much later in the process where people are already constantly thinking about and wanting to be a part of the modern-day phenomena known as online social networking.
It’s like if you compared X-box sales with the original Nintendo and Sega Genesis. To reach a certain figure of sales (say 100,000 unit sales) for Nintendo and Sega Genesis, it would have taken a very similar time frame to do so (like Facebook and Twitter show in the graph below). But with X-box, it would have hit that figure (100,000 unit sales) much, much quicker, since it came out in the midst of the video game system craze.
Though Myspace was the first pioneer, Facebook (and then Twitter) were pioneers of the modern day online social networking. All of these paved the way for Google+ to piggy back on such a trend and sky-rocket in it’s first few weeks.
2) It will be interesting to note the statistics after a 3 to 4 year period (1000-1500 days). While I won’t be surprised if Google+ has a higher number of users than Facebook or Twitter after a longer measured period (as Twitter did with Facebook), I do believe the numbers will be much closer and leveled out.
Just some thoughts to ponder on online social networking.
The Prodigal Thought 
Wow. That is simply insane!
Not only will it be interesting to see figures after 1,000 days or so, but it will be interesting to see how frequency of use changes over time. Facebook has folks addicted to games, so they keep coming back there to play them. But if/when that isn’t combined with non-game interaction, it becomes more of a game system than a social network. Having to water their pumpkins or whatever has them coming back daily, but their level of gaming activity doesn’t equate to sharing information with friends on a regular basis. Most folks that I know that use Twitter either do it from a mobile device while on the go, or feed it automatically from blog posts or something. It isn’t a regular thing either. G+ has the opportunity to be very info-driven, particularly as it gets incorporated more into Google searches. When I can easily share something I find in a search and see what links in a search others of my friends with similar interests have shared or +1ed, it is going to be information based social interaction and not game based. I think Sparks is their first step towards that. It will be interesting to see in the long run as Facebook is monetizing based on games. Can Google do something similar on information without adding adwords based advertising to our G+ status feeds? Will they incorporate You-Tube clips as their entertainment side to compete with FB games?