A new report suggests that the rapid growth of new Google+ users is beginning to slow down. However the social networking service launched by Google less than a month ago is still on track to exceed 18 million users sometime today. These numbers come from Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen who has been posting up his own estimates of Google+ user growth on his Google+ page.
As he states, " ... more than 750,000 people joined the site on Monday". That compares to earlier this month where Allen claims we saw two days where more than 2 million signed up in a single day." If growth had continued at that rapid pace, Google+ would have reached the 20 million user base mark last Sunday. Still reaching 18 million users inside of a month for a service that is technically still invite only is impressive.
Allen also points out that Google hasn"t flexed its considerable resources to actively market Google+ yet. What is the company waiting for? Allen speculates, "Perhaps the product management team is still trying to get the product right. They are certainly paying attention to what customers are saying and responding quickly to try to improve the service. Perhaps the engineering team, which has publicly admitted some degree of surprise at the amount of traffic Google+ has already generated, needs more time for scalability. It"s probably a combination of those two factors." He adds, "Chairman Eric Schmidt says the vision is to integrate Circles and sharing with all the other Google properties. When that happens, you will likely see millions of people joining Google+ every day for some period of time." If that happens you might also see lots of people fleeing Google+"s biggest rival Facebook to join the new service.