The unofficial Google+ “body counter”, Paul Allen, has posted that Google+ had a 30% user growth in just 2 days after it went publicly open for all and now the total number of users is estimated to be 43.4 million!

Just to put these stats under the right perspective- It took Twitter 5 years and LinkedIn about 7 years to reach for 100 million users while Google+ reached for almost half of it in only 3 months…

Paul is saying in his post that “it is clear that Google+ is absolutely exploding” and i think that even if his numbers and model may be not so accurate, it can still illustrate a mass flow of new members to Google+ in a never seen before rate.

Paul Allen’s Model

The model is taking 400 common surnames from Google+ and dividing them by their relative percentage in the population. The average number from the 400 results, suppose to be similar to the number of Google+ users.

For example, if the surname “Smith” is 1% from the population (completely arbitrary) and in Google+ there are 100 users with the surname “Smith”, the total (estimated) number of Google+ users is 10,000 (100/0.01).

Fudge Factor: Additionally, the model adds another 5% for private profiles and another 10% for non-Roman alphabet user names that can’t be addressed. I know, it isn’t accurate but it can give a general idea about the number of users and their growing rate.