When you are the 800 lb gorilla everyone is gunning for you. We love to build up new companies and we also love it when someone else comes along to knock them down a few notches too. Perhaps that is the magic of our capitalist system…innovate or die. In 7 short years Facebook rose from a single university website to a worldwide phenomenon with over 750 million members, annihilating websites big and small along the way like Friendster and MySpace. Last year Facebook overtook Google in terms of weekly market share of visits. Some in the community were asking if that spelled the beginning of the end for Google. Well, Google recently came out with a new product called Google+, and while the product has a fraction of the unique visitors that Facebook has, the sheer speed in which it has been adopted online has been meteoric to say the least. In less than a month, and only by invitation, Google+ has grown from 0 to over 20 million users, according to Experian Hitwise. Where Google + may go is anyone’s guess, but there is reason to believe the people at Facebook are putting in even more overtime to keep the lead in social media. Here is an infographic from SingleGrain showing the growth and comparing Facebook and Google+ through mid-July.
