On December 6, 2012, Vic Gundotra, a senior vice president at Google, posted on the company’s official blog to launch new Google+ features. His second paragraph began with a claim: “Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever.”
Then he gave the size of it, three times in one sentence. “More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1’ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search…), and 135 million are active in just the stream.”
The three figures counted different things: people who had upgraded, people active somewhere across Google, and people active in the stream alone. Each could be true by its own definition. Each answered a different question.
The pattern had started early. Google+ launched in June 2011. On January 19, 2012, in Google’s quarterly results, chief executive Larry Page said it now had 90 million users globally, well over double what he had announced three months earlier.
The next day, TechCrunch noticed a change in Google’s sign-up page. Creating a new Google account now meant creating a Gmail address and a presence on Google+. The writer said the change “smells of an attempt to boost G+ numbers.”
About a month later, The Wall Street Journal ran a story under the headline “The Mounting Minuses at Google+.” It opened on the 90 million people who had registered, and said those numbers masked what was really going on. According to comScore figures the Journal cited, Google+ visitors on personal computers spent about three minutes a month on the site, compared with six to seven hours on Facebook. The figures left out phones.
Google kept building. The December 2012 post launched Communities, groups built around shared interests.
On October 8, 2018, Google announced that it would shut Google+ down for consumers. It said Google+ had not achieved broad consumer adoption, and that its programming interfaces were hard to maintain; an audit had found a bug that gave outside apps access to some profile fields users had not marked as public. The number it published this time was not about how many people had joined.
“The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement,” the company wrote. “90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”