Two weeks have gone by since Google announced the launch of Google+, the social networking site that some have called the Facebook killer. It still has a long way to go before it is more than an annoying pimple on Mark Zuckerberg’s backside, but it is growing fast and furious. While Facebook is approaching 800 million users, Google+ has 10 million. On the one hand, it got those users in just two weeks, and the most popular user on the site is, of all people, Mark Zuckerberg. Google can also draw on its extensive database of Gmail users to get the site going. Gmail has about 200 million monthly users, which is a nice pool of people to draw from.

On the other hand, the +1 button that is the equivalent to Facebook’s Like may be a better gauge of Googe+’s success. According to Google CEO Larry Page, it gets 2.3 billion hits a day, and he added, “We’re just at the beginning of what we want to do.” This could account, at least in part for the record revenue of $9.03 billion that Google announced on Thursday (though it really has more to do with the growing popularity of the Android phone).

As a jab at Facebook, Page said that the Circles feature on Google+, “has been very well received, because in real life we share different things with different people.” Not everyone agrees with him, however. In a blog posted this morning in Search Engine Watch, Dave Davies noted that, “About 80 percent of the people I know are OK with one level of sharing,” listing his father, grandmother, and sister among them. He does not believe that Google+ will be a Facebook killer, though he does think that even if it become only half as popular as Facebook itself, “the information on relationships they could collect and what that could mean to them as far as feeding advertising in our direction more accurately would be incredible.” The average user stands to benefit from having both around.

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