The Fall of Google or Not

One has to wonder if Mr. Zuckerburg and FaceBook is paying the digital media outlet to taught the down fall of Google at the slightest dip of any measurable stat.

Here’s some facts that are so prevalent on the interwebs I’m not going to bother citing them; they’re just that easy to find.

Google+ Achieved over 20 million members in one month during an invite only closed beta with limited acceptances of the invites.

FaceBook has been around since 2001, that’s ten years, and has 750 million members.

Since the stats folks don’t seemed concerned about one person/multi-profiles I won’t be.

So let’s do some math. Assuming an even growth rate [Yes, I know that doesn’t happen.] let’s do some math.

FB: [calculated in millions] 750 / 10 years / 12months = 6.25

That means FaceBook only had a growth rate of 6.25 million a month over a 10 year period.

G+: [calculated in millions] 20 * 12 months * 10 years = 2400

So in 10 years of even growth Google+ will hit 2.4 billion [that’s with a “B”].

Is that a realistic number, of course not, or is it?

Back to the Mr. Zuckerburg and FaceBook comment though, last night, while digging through all my RSS feeds, one common them kept creeping up. All the headlines were about Google+ taking a nose dive on its growth rate. The headlines were all about the dramatic failure of G+ and that only the early adopters were keeping it alive. So I dug a little deeper.

There’s been a 3% dip of new sign ups to Google+ in the last week. Wow, 3% dip is tragic. It’s the end of the world that a closed invite only beta that regulates acceptance of new sign ups based on available server load.

Seems like all these overly dramatic headlines and articles are an artificial inflation of the impact a 3% dip actually is. Besides, it’s 3% of what? If I had to guess it would be a 3% difference between one week and another; but, none of the articles say this. And there’s all this talk about business pages. If I recall correctly, at the launch of FaceBook there were no business pages either. If you remember, FaceBook started as a college sharing thing and started leveraging money from that. In other words, Mr. Zuckerburg’s beta of FaceBook didn’t have business pages either. It started out by focusing on the personal user experience and not the business user experience. The legitimate use of business pages didn’t come until much later.

I’m not out right accusing Mr. Zuckerburg of paying off the media channels to over dramatize quirks and bumps in the road for Google+, especially since the media is perfectly capable of sensationalizing things on their own, but it does seem ironic in a comical way.

Then again, maybe FaceBook is, they are rich enough. [There, a bit of my own sensationalizing.]

P.S. I’ll be keeping a close eye on things to see what happens when big G goes open to the general public with Google+. If the stats truly don’t hold up I’ll be the first to chastise dear old big G – and I’m sure they’ll listen.

Note: If you really can’t find the stats I’m listing here check out Endgadget, AndroidFan and Mashable to get your data harvesting whistle wet.

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Tags: commentary, standing out, value