There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats. To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet. There may be at mos

There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats. To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet. There may be at most a few people who occasionally post to it, and recently I've seen many switching to Twitter. Secondly, although not a perfect proxy, Google Trends shows an exponentially decaying trend that is hardly in line with their reported exponential growth: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c... Here's a zoomed-in graph in the last 12 months clearly showing the decaying tail: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c... Let's compare for example with Twitter (~140-200M actives) in the last 12 months: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1 http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit... Regardless of how you rationalize people searching for "twitter" vs. "google plus" as a proxy for active users, the decaying trend is clear. And it's hard to think of why the query "google plus" or "google+" would be 50-70 times less popular than "twitter" other than low the popularity of the service. Of course none of this is hard proof, and it's possible that my circles are just not representative of the internet as a whole and that Google Trends is a fantastically erroneous proxy for popularity, but personally I believe they're using an unrealistically optimistic metric for actives.