Google+ Now Has 20 Million Users

After an explosion of viral growth [1] and a period of somewhat slower [2] (but still incredibly fast) expansion, the three-week-old Google+ has reached [3] 20 million members, according to data from ComScore, which bases its estimates on a “global measurement panel” of two million web users. (Still no data on how much time people are spending on the new social network, though.)

The growth is especially impressive because the website is still invite-only, meaning that users must know someone already on the site, says the Wall Street Journal. Plus, Google hasn’t even begun marketing the site to the more than one billion monthly visitors to its search page, Gmail, and other services.

“I've never seen anything grow this quickly,” Andrew Lipsman, vice president of industry analysis at comScore, told the WSJ. The only other site that has matched this kind of visitor accumulation in a short period of time is Twitter back in 2009, he said, “but that happened over several months.”

Google+ still has a long way to go before it reaches Facebook’s 750 million users — or even Twitter’s 200 million — but if the site [4] can keep its users active and interested, it's only a matter of time.