A week after The Wall Street Journal boldly declared that Google+ was a ghost town, Google offered The New York Times a different version of the story. Google’s vice president for engineering Vic Gundotra told The Times's Nick Bilton that every day 50 million people "actively use the company’s Google Plus-enhanced products," a claim that Bilton himself says is a little bit blurry. As TechCrunch contributor MG Siegler makes clear in a blog post, "The key is how exactly Google measures 'actively' here." Does this mean pressing a +1 button anywhere on the web? Adding an update to your profile? Clicking on the little red notification box? We don't know, and Gundotra doesn't say. Nevertheless, Bilton, Siegler and everybody else we know seems to be in agreement that nobody's visiting Google+'s home page on a regular basis. Which, to borrow a term from the Wild West, is the very definition of a ghost town.

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Adam Clark Estes