Google Buzz, one of the firsts of few failing social experiences of Google before launching Google+, will be shut down in the next few weeks, so it was announced in an official blog post. Just a day before, on the third quarter of 2011 financial reports announcement, the CEO Larry Page announced that Google+ has now more than 40 million users.

The One Who Goes Down

Buzz started in early 2009 as a social effort to compete with Facebook, as an integral part of the users Gmail accounts. The service suffered from tons of criticism and Google even got sued for violating the privacy of the users and a year ago it was ruled it would pay $8.5 billion as compensation.

Not so long after Buzz was launched, it was already declared as a failure by many and Google understood that to succeed in the social networking arena, the company needs a high-class social network. Google’s product vice president Bradley Horowitz has said: “We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+”.

From my own experience i can testify that Buzz was really a bad service that was almost as difficult to socially interact with as work from home with…

The One Who Goes Up

After Google understood that Buzz simply isn’t good enough, it begun developing Google+ which launched three and half months ago only to invited users only and a month ago it opened its gates to everyone. Since then, there were many unofficial reports on massive user joining: Paul Allen’s model measured a 30% increase in 2 days and Experian Hitwise indicated on 15 million new members in a week.

Now, after all those and others unofficial reports, we finally have some official reference from Google: “(Google+) just passed the 40 million user mark”, Google’s CEO Larry Page has revealed. Although it is still very far away from Facebook’s 800+ million members and even from Twitter or LinkedIn which have more than 100 million members each, It seems that the young social network is on its way to success.