As part of its quarterly financial results today, Google announced that it now has 40 million registered users for its Google+ social networking service. The press release quotes Google CEO Larry Page as saying, "People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started!". While those are impressive numbers, they are also smaller than some previously announced estimates that were created by third parties. For example, Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, claimed that according to his estimates and formula, Google+ had 50 million users back in late September.
Google+ launched back in late June as an invite-only service. A few weeks later, Google announced that it had already had 10 million people registered for the service, even in its invite-only time period. Less than a month ago, Google opened the floodgates and let anyone sign up to use Google+. While having 40 million people register to use Google+ in just a few months is impressive it still lags well behind Facebook which has over 750 million users worldwide.
Google+ is already gaining some traction in the games industry. The company opened up the service for games several weeks ago. Zynga, which gets most of its users and its revenues from Facebook, has already launched its popular Cityville game on Google+. Earlier this week it announced that its latest game, Mafia Wars 2, is now available for both Facebook and Google+ users.