Google+? Love it or leave it, Google+ is claiming that the social networking site now has 90 million users.

How much actual Google+ users use the site is debatable. In my own personal circle of Google+ users, I have five people. I obviously don’t know whether I’m representative of the average Google+ user at large, but until more of my personal friends and business associates join Google+, I probably won’t use it all that much.

That said, there are some definite advantages for bloggers using Google+: Google has just started featuring Google+ users prominently in their search engine results. Of course, the new Google ranking policy started a small amount of controversy on the Internet.

The largest complainer about Google+’s new ranking policy?

Twitter has been complaining that they aren’t getting enough love from Google since Google started upping the ante for Google+ users. Will the lack of Google search engine love kill Twitter?

Again, probably not.

Twitter is fairly strong as a social networking medium. How many users does Twitter actually have? According to Twitter in March of 2011, Twitter had 175 million users. Business Insider got some inside information about Twitter which shows that the number of Twitter users may not be all that accurate. From Business Insider:

• There were 119 million Twitter accounts following one or more other accounts.
• There were 85 million accounts with one or more followers.

With these figures, and Twitter's claim of 175 million accounts, a little subtraction shows us that there are 56 million Twitter accounts following zero other accounts, and 90 million Twitter accounts with zero followers.

Contrast the Twitter or Google+ numbers to the number of Facebook users and it’s easy to recognize a huge difference; as of December 2011, there were 799 million+ Facebook users. According to Facebook, of the almost 800 million Facebook users, as many as 50% of them log into Facebook on any given day.

I doubt that Google is ready to share the real numbers behind their Google+ users, so it’s difficult to determine how competitive Google+ will be in the near future. I haven’t seen any number yet from Google that demonstrates how active the users on the actual social networking site, nor have I seen any articles leaking that information.

One strength that Google has in the social networking market is that Google is a well-known brand with a proven track record of establishing new services under their original umbrella.

What’s your experience been with Google+? Are you a user and more importantly, are you an active user who has taken advantage of the high Google search engine ranking? If you’ve tried the Google+ platform, how do you feel it compares to either Facebook or Twitter?

On a semi-related note, Google shares are down by 9% today.