Google+ has officially hit 10,000,000 users, according to statements made today by Google's CEO Larry Page before announcing Google's second quarter 2011 financial results. While Google+ is still only in beta format, according to Page the response so far from users has been "amazing", with over 1 billion items being shared every day. Page has his own Google+ account, though he is currently only the second most followed user, beaten only by perhaps a surprising fellow – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of the company Google+ is directly trying to compete with. It looks like Zuckerberg is following the "know your enemy" piece of wisdom "The Art of War", the writings of ancient Chinese scholar Sun Tzu.
As mentioned about a week ago, several members of the pnosker.com staff (including myself) have Google+ accounts. Each day I'm using mine more and more often, so I'm becoming more familiar with the features. The "stream" feature of Google+ functions exactly like Facebook's "status" updates, which is nice. However, one place where Google+ appears to have gotten the better of Facebook is with grouping followers via their "Circles" feature. Facebook has admitted that it's "List" feature has been underutilized so far, as it takes too long for users to actually make lists. But Google makes grouping friends, family members, and colleagues really easy, mostly because everyone is starting from scratch and will add people a few at a time, rather than spending hours to make Facebook lists of their 1000+ friends. Google+ is more like Google+1 here!
If you would like an invite to Google+, all I ask is for you to follow pnosker.com's Twitter account (and make sure you keep following it) and send me a tweet (@mikeconvente) of your email address. I'll invite as many as I can!
