Larry Page on Google+: Now 10 million strong

In a Google+ account, Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page announce one key statistic: Google+ has reached 10 million registered users.

In the Google+ account, Page says: “Google+ is still only in field trial with limited access as we scale the system. Users have to be invited, sign up with a profile in order to use it.  However, the growth on Google+ has been great–and I’m excited to release some new metrics for you today: Over 10M people have joined Google+. There’s also a ton of activity.  We are seeing over 1 billion items shared and received in a single day.”

Page also released more key statistics that indicate what could be a surge that reaches throughout the organization.

Over the course of the past few weeks with untold millions still waiting to get a Google+ invite or repeatedly attempting to register a Google+ account, people like Paul Allen of Ancestry.com and Family Link  as well as Blog Herald’s FrankyB have been trying to figure out just how many people have registered with the new social media site created by the search engine giant.

Allen’s figuring of Google+ user numbers were largely extrapolated from key US population data tracking surnames as well as estimated user growth rates and came up with the estimate that Google+ would have 20 million users by this weekend.

Blog Herald’s FrankyB did some search engine sleuthing and using Google Search, he queried: url:plus.google.com/*about site:plus.google.com.   This search turned up 39,700,000 and 40,100,000.

Franky says further, “It is important to understand that dynamic search engines such as Google (and most others) can not return an exact number of results found… We do not know either whether all results returned are unique profiles, but based on the number around 40 million it is safe to say that Google+ has already reached more than 25 million users in less than one month.”

Despite what the Page account in Google+, Allen and Frank could still be right about their figuring when you consider the fact that there’s no real way that I know of that would enable one to independently check the figures out.

One hunch is that there is an advantage to keeping the cool vibe of  semi-exclusivity with the claim of being one of the first 10 million to have a Google+ accounts.  Most people want to get into the cool club that won’t let them in and by extending that a bit more until Google+ opens the gates wide open.  Tt can theoretically create what could appear to be a massive surge — with numbers virtually doubling or tripling over a couple of weeks.  From cool club exclusivity, Google+ could then transform into a bandwagon marketing phase.

Apart from Page’s announcement on Google+ users, he also reported that +1 button is being served 2.3 billion times a day.  He also indicated that 550,000 Android Devices were activated a day and Chrome now has over 160 million users.

Beyond the current numbers indicating Google+ spread among social media users, what could be the bigger story is that Google’s CEO could be holding true to an earlier statement that he isn’t positioning the company against Facebook but moving into an entirely different area all together — that could actually dwarf Facebook’s 750 million user base.  One referred to this as the “Blue Ocean Strategy”.

Page’s latest statement builds on this,  “Our goal with Google+ is to make sharing on the web like sharing in real life, as well as to improve the overall Google experience.”

It seems he isn’t talking about just social media but an entire slew of online activities where social sharing is just a small part of it. If you find that hard to believe, just look at your Google bar.