Clearly, people are interested in Google+, but how many people are using the service? According to a recent report, it could be more than 4.5 million.
In a recent Google+ post, Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen (not to be confused with the Microsoft co-founder) pulled together some data based on US Census Data and the number of Google+ members with certain last names. His conclusion? Google+ is "growing like crazy" and likely has almost 5 million users.
"My model is based on US Census Bureau data about how many people there are in the U.S. with each surname," Allen wrote. "I've described before the shortfalls of this model for calculating non-US users. But I haven't seen a better methodology from anyone else yet about estimating Google+ growth, so I'll continue to work on this one."
The number of people with the last name "Maring," for example, jumped from three on Monday to nine on Saturday. There were 15 Tozzi on Monday, but 31 by Saturday, and so on.
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"On Monday there were a large number of uncommon US surnames with no Google+ users by those names. Today, I'm finding very few US surnames with no Google+ users," Allen said yesterday. That includes four people with the last name Louderback, Allen said, one of which happens to be PCMag's former editor-in-chief.
Allen stressed that he is only a fourth of the way through updating his list of surnames, "but preliminary calculations suggest that since Monday, Google+ users have grown by 2.8x, that is from 1.7 million to 4.7 million." He promised more data on Monday.
"We don't have any comment on the number of people in the Google+ Field Trial," a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. When it re-opened Google+ invites recently, the company said it wanted to double the number of people in its "field trial," but declined to say exactly how many people that entailed.
Facebook, meanwhile, recently confirmed that it now has 750 million users, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company didn't publicize the milestone because user numbers are not as important as they once were. LinkedIn is also now the second most-popular social-networking service as MySpace continues to decline, TechCrunch reported.
One thing that might not help the Google+ user count is spam. Over the weekend, Google apologized for spamming some Google+ users with duplication notification emails.
For more, see PCMag's full hands-on with Google+, the slideshow below, as well as 6 Things Google+ Can Do That Facebook Can't and Social Networking Showdown: 8 Facebook Features Google+ Doesn't Have (Yet). On privacy, see Google+ Privacy: Has Google Learned Its Lesson?