Google+ experiences recent growth spurt

PanARMENIAN.Net - Google's infant social network experienced a recent growth spurt, CNN reports.

Google+ has more than 90 million registered users, Google CEO Larry Page said during the company's earnings presentation on Thursday, Jan 19. That more than doubles the 40 million that Google reported in October.

"We're very excited about the growth we've had, and we've certainly seen a tremendous number of people added every day," Page said. "That notion of identity is a deep part of what we're doing."

Google launched its social network last June. Since then, it has added toolbars and other buttons on its websites to aggressively promote the service. Google stirred up controversy last week when it began giving prominent placement to Google+ pages in results delivered by its search engine.

On average, Google engineers have introduced a new feature related to Google+ every day since its launch, Page said.

It took Facebook about four years to reach 90 million users, according to Facebook's public statements. After starting as a students-only service, Facebook now has 800 million people checking their accounts at least once a month, about 10 times that of Google+.

Analysts say Google+ was built specifically to challenge Facebook's growing dominance on the Web. Google and Facebook generally do not collaborate. Another rival social network, Twitter, complained that the recent changes to Google search favor Google+ and harm Twitter's ranking on results pages.

Google+ has recently added new features to the mobile Web version that will be coming to the native apps soon, ReadWriteWeb reports.

The What's Hot section, which highlights trending and popular posts, now has its own stream. The update also enables users to see who +1'd a post by clicking on the +1 count. Google+ added What's Hot last October. It's one of several ways to discover new content on Google+. On the desktop, it appears periodically in the main news stream as well as on the left sidebar, under the user's circles.