jul 1, 2014 - Three years in, future of Google Plus remains unclear

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Google hasn't released any user statistics since October, when it said 540 million people worldwide used Google Plus credentials to sign in or post comments on any Google service in the previous month. A smaller group of 300 million visited "the stream" of Google Plus itself, but even that figure counts people who merely click the red Google Plus symbol that can appear on-screen while using other Google services, causing a short list of updates to appear in the corner.

By comparison, Facebook boasts 1.28 billion monthly active users worldwide, although that reportedly includes people who click a Facebook icon to "like" or share something they find on another site while signed into Facebook.

Nielsen researchers use stricter definitions to estimate that 27.4 million U.S. residents visited the Google Plus website in April and 45.6 million opened its smartphone app, with some overlap between the two. Nielsen's estimates for Facebook were 117.8 million U.S. users on the website and 116.7 million on the mobile app, also with some overlap.

Google Plus always faced an uphill battle against the more established Facebook, said Charlene Li, a social media expert and founder of research firm Altimeter Group. "If your friends are not on Google Plus, and likely they're not, you're going to go on Facebook."

Still, the number of Google Plus active users is roughly the same size as those on another service - Twitter, according to both Nielsen and Forrester Research. And while there's no direct advertising on Google Plus, said Forrester's Elliott, companies that maintain a page on Google Plus have more online interactions with their followers than they do on Twitter.

"Google Plus is actually a useful social site" for companies to promote their brands, he said, but "even Google doesn't seem to understand the value of Google Plus as a standalone property."

Altimeter's Li said the future may lie elsewhere. While Google already operates a variety of apps and services, she noted that Facebook is building and buying a stable of stand-alone apps that let people directly share pictures, news items and messages with their friends - all without visiting Facebook's main site.

"The idea of a destination site, like the Google Plus page," she said, "is getting kind of antiquated.

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