Google+ May Pass Twitter With One-Fifth of U.S. Adults Online

(Bloomberg) — Google Inc.’s new social-networking service may grow to claim 22 percent of online U.S. adults in a year, passing Twitter Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. to be the second- most-used social site after Facebook Inc., a survey found.

Google+ has signed up 13 percent of U.S. adults and will add 9 percent over the next year, according to the survey from Bloomberg/YouGov. In the same period, Facebook will lose about 2 percentage points of U.S. adults to keep 69 percent of that population, while Twitter and LinkedIn continue to grow their portion of users.

Started in late June, Google+ is growing faster than Facebook and MySpace Inc. did in their early days. The service, which lets people connect with and manage groups of friends on a website, gained about 25 million users worldwide in less than a month, estimates market researcher ComScore Inc. Facebook has more than 750 million active users.

“Google+ is tracing a path similar to Facebook’s initial growth — building excitement in a core group of early adopters,” said Michael Nardis, head of YouGov investment products, in a statement about the survey. More...

08-05-2011 15:25