Very few Australians appear to have been granted access to the Google+ social-networking site which was launched three weeks ago and now has 20 million users.
Web-traffic watcher comScore estimated Google+ has had 20 million unique visitors since its launch, including five million visitors from the USA. There is no ranking for Australian visitors despite their being rankings for Countries like India, UK, Canada and Germany.
A Google spokeswoman declined comment.
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The Wall Street Journal said that ComScore, estimates are based on a “global measurement panel” of two million Internet users, similar to the approach Nielsen uses to measure television ratings,doesn’t have data on the number of minutes people spent on Google+.
Still, the growth of Google+ has impressed observers because access to it is by invitation only, meaning people can join only if a current member invites them. And the company hasn’t yet marketed the service to the more than one billion monthly visitors who use its search engine, Gmail and other services.
Google+ lets people share comments, articles, photos and videos with various “circles” of friends or contacts, or they can share content publicly with any user who wants to view their posts. Eventually, Google plans to incorporate features of Google+ in its other services, such as its YouTube video site.
“I’ve never seen anything grow this quickly,” said Andrew Lipsman, vice president of industry analysis at comScore. The only other site that has accumulated as many new visitors in a short period of time is Twitter in 2009, he said, “but that happened over several months.”
