Britney Spears Ousts Google CEO as Most-Followed on Google P Source: David Murphy
Move over, Google CEO Larry Page. As the oft-referenced "Queen of Pop" has been known to say �Ceven going so far as to subhead her Google Plus profile page with this very quote �C "It's Britney Bitch!"
That's Britney as in Britney Spears, pop singer-turned-social-media-maven who now officially takes top honors as the most-followed person on Google Plus (even though Page's company built the service to begin with).
But don't count the CEO out of the running just yet. As of this article's writing, Spears leads at 767,936 followers, but Page is still within shooting range at 760,331 followers of his own. The official ousting of Page by Spears allegedly occurred this past Monday.
It took spears just over two months since the July launch of Google Plus to hit the big 100,000 follower mark, and just around ten days after that to quadruple her count. According to the website Social Statistics, she currently follows around one person for every 178 followers that add her to one of their own Google Plus circles.
Page only needed around a half or month or so to reach his first 100,000 followers, but it took him around two months to quadruple that figure. The Google CEO doesn't publish who he adds to his own circles on the service, so you'll have to make your own conjectures about how many Google Plus profiles he actually follows back.
The rest of the "Google Plus Top Five" fills out as follows: Rapper Snoop Dogg sits in third place with 655,513 followers as of this article's writing. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who hasn't shared a single thing on the service, we note) takes up fourth at 611,131 followers, and fashion icon (and famed "Top Model" host) Tyra Banks pulls in a distant fifth with 544,187 followers.
So who's going to be the first to hit the fabled one-million follower count on Google Plus? Perhaps the better question is, "When?" Or even, "What," as in, "What will these users do once they've followed their favorite celebrities?"
Google announced in October that the service had surpassed the 40-million-user mark (after soft-launching in late June and officially opening up signups in late September), but that's a count of total signups, not active Google Plus users. Google has yet to disclose that number, and tech pundits have been suggesting it's a sign that actual user engagement on the platform is a lot lower than Google wants to currently admit.
Ask Google reps, however, and you'll get a different answer: "It's a number we're very happy with," said Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of engineering at Google, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus.
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