Google chief Larry Page said on July 14 that the Internet giant's freshly launched Google+ social network already has more than 10 million members. "Over 10 million people have joined Google-Plus," Page said during a quarterly earnings conference call. "That is a great achievement for the team."
He added that more than a billion items are shared daily at Google+. Google launched its rival to Facebook on June 28, with membership limited to invitation-only while the service remains in a test phase.
"Online sharing is awkward. Even broken, and we aim to fix it," Google's senior vice president for engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post about the social-networking initiative. Unveiling Google+, Gundotra stressed the ability it gives users to separate online friends and family into different "Circles," or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle.
"We'd like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software," he said.
One of the criticisms of Facebook is that updates are shared with all of one's friends unless a user has gone through a relatively complicated process to create separate Facebook Groups. Google+ is located at plus.google.com.