Google+ Now Has A Tablet Version, Events, 250M Users, 75M Daily, More Mobile Than Desktop

Today at Google I/O, Google announced it has 250 million total users, 150 million monthly users, and 75 million daily users, with more usage from mobile than desktop. It released an Android tablet version too, and an iPad version is coming soon.

Google+ today launches Events, with a focus on beautiful invites, a deep integration with Google Calendar, and real-time automatic photo uploads through Party Mode. G+ is also getting brand new navigation, new ribbon bar, new notifications, and brand new profiles.

This month is Google+’s one year birthday, and Vic Gundrota rattled off stats in hopes of convincing the world of its momentum. He said 50% of monthly users (150 million) sign in every day, so that means 75 million DAU. Sure that’s only around 15% of what Facebook has, but not bad.

Google+ active users spend over 60 minutes a day across Google products, and 12 minutes per day in the Google+ stream. Even if these are just highly engaged early-adopters, many of which might be Google fanboys, that’s a pretty stunning total of 360 minutes per month. For comparison, the average Facebook user spends 441 minutes per month on that social network.

Events comes with “cinemagraphic themes” aka animated invites that fold and move to show pictures. There’s also “Party Mode”, once eneabled on your device, all new photos get automatically added in real-time. And you can show a real-time slideshow of all those photos.

Vic Gundotra explained how after a party, Event guests will be emailed to upload photos. They’re then combined with Party Mode photos and Google collates them in chronological order in one place you can browse. Those with the most engagement are highlighted on a special page.

Google+ also got some updates in Android’s new 4.1 Jelly Bean OS. You can +1 or share posts with your Circles straight from Android notifications, without opening the app.

The Google+ platform has had a tough month, with Electronic Arts and Wooga pulling games from its platform to dedicate resources where there are more users. Meanwhile, Airtime launched a video chat network that could steal share from Google+ Hangouts.

On the other hand, its mobile apps recently got a gorgeous update that makes them much more visually advanced than Facebook and Twitter on the go.

With today’s growth announcement and new interfaces, maybe people will finally stop calling it a ghost town.