Google co-founder and chief executive Larry Page has claimed that its online social networking service Google+ has got 40 million users.
The announcement comes a week after reports claimed that the spike in interest after the networking site was opened to the public had disappeared soon after.
On 20 September, Google+ opened to the public. Web trackers had said that traffic surged 1,269% in the week, when the announcement was made. The number of visits to Google’s social networking service service Google+ in the US surged 14 times in the week after the company opened the service to the general public, according to online tracker Experian Hitwise. According to Experian Hitwise, the Google+ site received almost 15 million US visits in the week ended 24 September compared with 1.1 million the previous week.
However, Readwriteweb reported last week that traffic data from analytics firm Chitika showed that the social network has erased those gains entirely. The report said that the spike in interest in the social networking site, which peaked a few days after the service was opened to the public, plunged. Google+’s popularity is back to square one, said Readwriteweb.
Now Page has claimed that far from witnessing a dip in the site, Google+ is attracting more and more people.
"People are flocking to Google+ at an incredible rate and we are just getting started," Page told Relaxnews.
He also hinted that the site will receive a further boost once the company integrates other products with it.
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"Last quarter we shipped ‘plus’ and now we are going to ship the Google part," Page said.
"We are still at the very early stages of what technology can deliver," he continued. "These tools we use online will look very different in five years time and we are building these tools into Google-plus."
Meanwhile, Google has announced that it will shut down its Buzz service, which had caused a huge embarrassment to the company after users across the world raised privacy concerns.
The company tweaked the features of Buzz, but the service never took off as expected. Now Google said that it is killing the service to focus on Google+. The company has provided a channel for users to download content as well.
The company said, "In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.
"Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome," said Google.
The company announced that on 15 January 2012 it will shut down Jaiku, remove iGoogle’s social features, and close the University Research Program for Google Search.
The company is also closing the Google Labs site. It said that Boutiques.com and the former Like.com websites will be replaced by Google Product Search as well.
