news.com - GOOGLE is a latecomer to social networking but its new site is growing much faster than MySpace, Facebook or Twitter did in their early days, according to technology experts.
However it still remains to be seen whether Google Plus can pose a serious threat to Facebook, which has more than 750 million members.
Andrew Lipsman, vice president for industry analysis at tracking firm comScore, said Google Plus, which was launched on June 28, had 25 million unique visitors as of July 24.
During a panel discussion hosted by Wedbush Securities, Mr Lipsman said it took other social networks much longer to reach 25 million users — 22 months for Myspace, 33 months for Twitter and 37 months for Facebook.
"Obviously, this is a very strong growth trajectory," he said.
He cautioned, however, that Google "has a really large user base it can build off of" with its one billion users worldwide.
And it still has a "really long way to go to be competitive with Facebook", Mr Lipsman said.
"Google Plus is the fastest by a long shot but it's important to realise that fastest may not always be best," he said.
"Sometimes, that slow build can lead to a strong network effect that pays long-term dividends."
Most Google Plus users — 6.4 million — are in the US, followed by India with 3.6 million, Canada with 1.1 million, Britain with 1.1 million and Germany with over 920,000, according to comScore.
Mr Lipsman said many Plus users appeared to also be users of Gmail and display a "very strong early adopter profile".
He said the ratio of men to women was about two to one and that 60 per cent of users were between the ages of 18 and 34.
In the US, the highest numbers of Google Plus users are in the tech-savvy cities of San Francisco and Austin, he said.
Steve Rubel, executive vice president for global strategy and insights at public relations firm Edelman, said Facebook was not "vulnerable immediately" to Google.
"I don't see (Google Plus) taking significant share from Facebook in the next 18 months," he said.
At the same time, "what we have seen is that over the years there's never been a social network or community that has had significant staying power," he said.
"There's always a shuffling every two or three years, a changing of the guard.
"We saw it with Myspace," he said of the one-time social networking leader that has been losing users ever since it was eclipsed by Facebook.
Mr Rubel said Google was compelled to try its hand at social networking because Facebook was restricting the access of its search engine to Facebook content.
"What's happening is more content is being created behind Facebook's walls than ever before and a lot of that content is invisible to Google," he said.
"Conceptually, at least, they're building kind of an alternate web... There's also an entire web that is app-based on mobile phones. That is also invisible to them."
Mr Rubel said it was conceivable that more content would be invisible to Google in five or 10 years than what the search engine can see today.
"So they had to make a play to get more people to create content on their site," he said.
"It's to get more people to spend time on Google."
In unveiling Plus, Google stressed its ability to let users separate online friends and family into different "Circles", or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle.
One of the criticisms of Facebook is that updates are shared with all of one's friends unless a user has gone through a relatively complicated process to create separate Facebook Groups.
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