Google+ to pass 18 million users, many of them ladies

Plucky little social network startup Google+ is set to pass 18 million users Wednesday — a whole 2.4 percent of Facebook's 750 million users — according to technologist Paul Allen. And contrary to earlier reports, more than a few of those users are ladies!

While 2.4 percent may sound unimpressive, at least when you think of it in terms of body fat (Ladies, am I right?), Business Insider points out, "That's an impressive milestone for a still-technically-invite-only service that only recently launched."

What's more, Google hasn't even busted out its guaranteed-to-make-you-cry marketing campaign for the new effort. That's the same patented approach that won our hearts with a "Parisan Love Story" told by Google Search, and the Chrome commercial that put a lump in our collective throat when Woody from "Toy Story" told LGBT kids "You'll be fine, partner."

Allen predicted the latest Google+ milestone using the same surname-based method he used to show that contrary to early reports that Google+ users were approximately 87 percent male, it's closer to 66.4 percent male and 33.6 percent female (as of July 7). While that's still too much of a dude fest for a company that needs mainstream (rather than geek) appeal to survive, Allen's numbers also show a steady narrowing of the gender gap. Just three days earlier, on July 4, Allen recorded a 77 percent male to 23 percent female ratio.

The methodology seems pretty solid — you can read about it here — and Allen says he's tweaked it since he accurately predicted Google+ reached 10 million users before the search giant made the official announcement.

What we're watching here is (the latest) bloody battle to own the Internet. It's kind of cool. Not long ago (eons in Internet years), Google was chiefly the awesomest of search engines and Facebook, a cozy college-based social network thankfully free of glitter gifs. "Social networks drive an ever increasing share of traffic on the Internet, and that traffic is power and money," Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry points out in the tellingly-titled Business Insider piece, "The Obvious Reason Why Google NEEDS to Win Social That Nobody Talks About."

Facebook is the favorite in this match of course, because we're already there. And you know us, we hate Change.

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For all its innovations (Orkut aside), Google is indeed late to the social party. In the time it took to get here however, Google's done its homework. Just a cursory tour of Google+ reveals that the engineers took note of our basic Facebook complaints —navigation, privacy and navigating privacy — and did the opposite.

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A few examples: The intuitive drag-and-drop feature in Google+ allows you to sort your social circles. No need to click through an endless maze of account settings to avoid sharing that embarrassing party picture with Grandma or your co-workers. And speaking of embarrassing party pictures, if someone from your Google+ social circle tags you in a photo, you have the option of approving that tag — something Facebook never had.

Earlier this week we learned that Facebook and other social media sites continue to scrape the bottom of customer satisfaction in the U.S. Only "airlines, subscription TV and newspapers do worse," according to findings in the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report. And with Google+ as a recent Facebook challenger, the results may be very different next year, ACSI said.

More on Google+:

• Google+ iPhone app finally available
• Facebook, other social media sites rank low for customer satisfaction
• How to transfer photos from Facebook to Google
• How creepy is Google+ exactly?
• Why did Google+ users get hit by a spam attack?

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook ... and see if you can find her on Google+. She triple-dog dares you!