I sincerely doubt the service will die in a "year, tops" with 40 million users, as of the last numbers we've heard. Do you have any actual evidence or data to back up your opinion, or are you merely spouting random personal bias?
I signed up for G+ when it launched. I haven't been on it in months. And yet I am sure I am one of those 40M members cited by Google. That 40M figure is garbage. 40M may have tried G+; but a very small percentage are hooked to it or like it. G+ won't tell us what percentage that is but it's a pretty solid bet when a company refuses to share engagement metrics, it is because they don't look good.
Exactly: random personal bias. Just because you haven't been back there doesn't mean anything about the rest of the user base. The same could be said about anyone that's signed up for Facebook or Twitter and are part of their 600 and 100 million user statistics, respectively.
I'm as curious to see engagement metrics as much as the next guy, but I'm not reading tea leaves to predict doom and destruction for not happening to release those numbers just 6 weeks after the site came out of beta. You're trying too hard.
Despite the bullish talk about levels of engagement on Google Plus, I continue to find it strange that Google won't tell us how many of the reported 40+ million users are active, daily users.
Frustrated at not getting a straight answer to that, I optimistically asked Gundotra if he would at least give me the percentage of active daily users to total. But he wouldn't be drawn into that question either.
So I asked: what kinds of things are people doing on Google Plus right now? Vic Gundotra pointed to photo sharing.
"Since we went to field trial on June 28," he remarked, "we've had 3.4 billion photos uploaded to Google Plus."
Google+ already seems to be much more popular than Buzz.
How do you know? There are two reasons one may feel that a product is very popular:
1. You read about it all over the media
2. You hear from friends screaming at you to get on it cuz it's "sooo good!"
With Google+, it's almost all #1 and very little to none of #2. If anyone knows about facebook's early years, it was the complete opposite. The press barely knew about facebook(part of it was because you needed a .edu email to just get in). And yet facebook kept piling on users and even more importantly, engagement.
So sure Google+ may have convinced 40M of hundreds of millions of google.com users to click on a button and agree to opt in to google+, but that doesn't mean jack in the social network game. It's all about engagement. And Google+'s engagement is next to nothing.
My Google+ feed is significantly more active than my Facebook feed. I see hundreds of Google+ posts go by in a day, but only about 3 or 4 Facebook posts.
