Google’s senior vice president of engineering stated this week that Google+ now has 100 million monthly users and is rising.
Vic Gundotra also stated that the site now has 400 million registered users and 100 million active users. These numbers are impressive, given the fact that Google+ has been launched for only one year.
Gundotra also stated at Google’s I/O conference that Google+ has 150 million active users. Why the discrepancy? Google says the higher number comes from the people who are clicking a +1 button or are somehow interacting with the social layers that are all over Google Search, Gmail or YouTube.
The 100 million users that are ‘active’ come from the people who actually visit the desktop site for Google+, or utilize the mobile app.
Whatever the numbers are, Google+ has a ways to go before it is going to catch up with Facebook. As of this writing, Facebook has 955 million active monthly user accounts.
Interestingly, Google made this announcement about Google+ in an announcement about the acquisition of Nik Software, which is the maker of the photo-editing app Snapseed. This deal could help to make Google+ more popular. How? By becoming a better platform for photographers.
They may be able to shoot more effective photos on their smartphone and then upload them pics to the network. Snapseed is a very powerful photo-editing app on the iPhone. The firm does not have an app for the Android platform yet. Also, this acquisition may be able to help boost the functionality of Google’s Picasa service. The latter is closely integrated with Google’s social networking services.
The Snapseed acquisition could increase the battle that is raging between Google and Facebook, which also has been improving its photo editing possibilities with the purchase of Instagram. One difference is that the Nik Software acquisition does not add a social network of photographers to Google’s offerings. That’s what Instagram has done for Facebook, which reports that users upload 300 million pictures a day to the site.