HAS GOOGLE+ REACHED 10 MILLION USERS? ACCORDING TO PAUL ALLEN, YES!

Google+ has been live for just 2 weeks, and in that time only those with access to an invite have managed to sign up. Even then, the invites didn’t always work due to overloading of the system, and Google seems to have underestimated the popularity of its new social network by not allocating enough disk space for notifications. Users have also responded by already asking for the 5,000 circle limit to be lifted.

Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and serial entrepreneur, has done a summary analysis and guesstimated the userbase has already gone past 10 million. He’s also predicting 20 million users by the time we reach the weekend.

Allen used a combination of surnames and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau to initially come up with a rough estimate on Google+ user numbers. He then later updated it to include international users too. For the moment, it’s the best guess we have until Google decides to share official numbers.

Allen’s analysis started on July 2nd and claimed 410,773 users across the U.S. He then expanded his survey internationally and by July 4th the U.S. userbase was up to 515,933 with a further 1,226,136 users outside the U.S. giving a total of 1,742,069 users. By July 10th, just 6 days later, that total had jumped to 7.3 million before passing 10 million yesterday, July 11th.

If that growth continues at the same rate then Allen predicts Google will have more than 20 million Google+ users before the week is over, and then the social network will be well on its way to reaching 100 million.

Although Facebook’s 750 million still looks a long way off, Mark Zuckerberg must be sweating a little at the pace of Google+.

FACEBOOK HITS 750 MILLION USERS

Facebook now has 750 million monthly active users worldwide, TechCrunch reported on Friday. That’s incredible growth since our earlier story, which suggested that the social network was closing in on 700,000,000 users worldwide. In that report, emerging markets showed the most growth — Brazil’s user base jumped 11.4% in May alone — and the United States was the top country; U.S. users were responsible for 149.4 million Facebook accounts. Last July, Facebook announced that it had hit the 500 million user mark, but it hasn’t publicly revealed any figures since then. Facebook only measures active users and only counts those who have logged into the social network during the past 30 days.

FACEBOOK SEES BIG TRAFFIC DROPS IN US AND CANADA

Facebook is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June. Most of the new users continue to come from countries that are relatively late in adopting Facebook, as has been the trend for the past year.

But overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual.

The company gained 11.8 million more people over May, following 13.9 million over April. In contrast, it grew by at least 20 million new users over the typical month in the past 12; while there have been a few months that have registered lower growth numbers, they have not been back to back.

Why the drop? Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year. Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000. If these countries — most of whom had adopted Facebook many years ago — had not lost users, and instead posted even small gains, Facebook would have had a much more typical month.

SONY BMG GREECE HACKED

It's the security nightmare that just won't end, and right now there's got to be plenty of Sony executives beginning to wish someone would pinch them already. After taking quite a PR and financial beating over the PSN breach, now the Greek site of Sony BMG has been hacked and the account info of thousands of users has been posted online.

According to the Sophos blog Naked Security, the attack does not appear to have been particularly sophisticated and was carried out using an automated SQL injection tool that demands more patience than skill. While the data dump reveals the usernames, real names, and email addresses of registered SonyMusic.gr customers, other fields (including passwords and telephone numbers) are either empty or contain fake data, suggesting the hack was not entirely successful.

HOW DIFFERENT SMARTPHONE OWNERS SEE EACH OTHER

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