Remember that tool that allowed you to import your Facebook friends into Google Plus (until Facebook blocked it)? Well, the tool's author Mohamed Mansour has revealed on Google+ that the tool had over 90K unique users. That led Mansour to argue that if up to 10% of Google+ users have installed the extenstion then Google+ has likely reached 1 million users already -- even those it remains in private beta.
This is pretty startling growth, and the logic is hard to argue. In fact, estimating that 10% of all Google+ users decided to install Mansour's Google Chrome extension is probably being fairly generous. That means it's more likely that Google+ already has over a million users. This helps understand why Google has been heavily throttling new invites to Google+ and why Facebook called an impromptu press conference this week to reveal features that they'd normally roll out with a press release or a blog post.
Here is the full text of Mansour's post on Google Plus:
No wonder why Facebook throttled the email visibility from your friends profile. According to Google Analytics, 90,624 unique people installed the extension since Google+ was released! In total, from November 2010 till now just 114,374 unique people. Extremely explosive growth! If everyone was successful exporting their friends, almost 10 million people successfully out of Facebook! Insane!Let us say only 10% of the current Google+ users used that extension, I believe it is safe to say there are at least (minimum) 1 Million Google+ users!