The third party web site traffic company comScore has now announced that Google"s social networking service Google now has 20 million registered users. The report, as described by the Wall Street Journal, comes less than a month after Google+ launched and is still technically an invite only service. ComScore also claims that number includes over five million US users. The article quotes Andrew Lipsman, the vice president of industry analysis at comScore, as saying, "I"ve never seen anything grow this quickly." ComScore uses a "panel" of two million Internet users as a basis for its results.
Officially Google said last week that Google+ has 10 million users. A spokesperson for Google would not comment on comScore"s numbers.
In related news. News.com reports that Google has decided to scale back its plans to start testing Google+ accounts for businesses. Google+ was started with an emphasis on individual accounts and had deleted pages that were made by corporations. Earlier this month the company announced it was developing a version of Google+ specifically for businesses and launched a web site for such groups to sign up to beta test this service.
However this week Google product manager Christian Oestlian stated in a Google+ post that they have received sign up requests from "tens of thousands of businesses, charities, and other organizations." He added, " ... we"ve been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google+ in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months." He repeated the request for businesses to not create Google+ pages, saying, "The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait."