By Craig Wilson

Google has been eager to succeed at social media, both because it appeals to its ethos and because it’s losing valuable consumer eyeballs to Facebook. Google+ is without doubt the search giant’s most successful social venture so far, but are people actually using it after they sign up?

Not that long ago it was entirely conceivable that a vast chunk of the world’s Internet traffic would pass through Google one way or another. Today, Facebook is enjoying enormous mindshare among consumers. That must be a worry for the boys from Mountain View.

Despite the success of Google Talk, Google Docs and all of the other Web apps the company has built in the past decade, it hasn’t yet managed to create a social network with the same general appeal.

Google+ is the search giant’s fourth foray into social media. It’s first, Orkut, was largely ignored globally, but took off in Brazil, where it’s now based. India and Japan have taken to it, too, but it’s largely failed to reel in consumers in markets like North America and Europe.

The second and third attempts, Google Friend Connect and Google Buzz, have fared even worse — so much so that both are scheduled for retirement early next year.

Compared to its predecessors, Google+ is a runaway success. The day after a by-invitation-only launch, people were allowed to invite anyone over 18 years old to join. Facebook, meanwhile, accepts anyone over 13, giving it the demographic that spends more time online than any other.

On the second day, demand was so high that within hours Google+ reverted to a closed beta. A little over a month later, all users were given 150 invites, and a month after that, in September, the service was opened to everyone.

One of the benefits of this approach was the inevitable hype. People fell over themselves to try and get invited in the early stages, and signed up in droves once the service opened to the public.

But, as MySpace and millions of gyms around the world have learnt, just because a person signs up for something doesn’t mean they’re actually going to use it. This is even truer when that something is free.

In a press release in mid-October, Google CEO Larry Page said Google+ had more than 40m users. However, that isn’t the interesting figure. What would be more instructive to know is how many of those users are active. Google hasn’t been forthcoming with this information, perhaps understandably so.

Facebook, meanwhile, claims to have in excess of 800m registered users. It says 500m of those are active and, even if that figure is inflated, Google+ still has a great deal of catching up to do.

Though it’s not really fair to compare Google+ to Facebook considering the latter’s enormous head start, Mark Zuckerberg’s social empire is undoubtedly the bar by which Google+ will be measured, by its peers and by itself.

Google clearly wants the public to think this way, as it’s been quick to trumpet rapid growth compared Facebook’s early days. Of course, when Facebook was starting out, half the battle was making people understand what a social network was — an impediment with which Google+ hasn’t had to contend.

Google itself, however, understands the battle perfectly well. Orkut launched on 24 January 2004; Facebook launched eleven days later. Google’s actually been playing the social media game for longer.

According to figures from US-based Hitwise Research, in the second week of November Google+ recorded its third largest number of visitors in a week and received more than 6,8m visits from the US. That’s 25% above the same period in October.

More importantly, the research notes that the average time spent on the site increased by 15% in October compared to September. That suggests newcomers are joining the service, and staying.

Google SA doesn’t have region-specific statistics, but its global figures confirm this. It says the service has seen more than 1bn items shared and received in a single day, 3,4bn photographs have been shared using the +1 button — Google’s version of Facebook’s “Like” — and the button alone is being served 5bn times a day across the Web.

That’s the best thing Google has done in the seven years since Orkut: it’s built an ecosystem of other services that now all feed into Google+.

Google says people are two to three times more likely to share content with one of their Google+ “circles” than to make a public post.

That’s one of the services it prides itself on — more control over who sees what. Of course, you can do the same thing on Facebook now.

At the beginning of November, Google+ made it possible to create pages for brands and companies and traffic spiked again. Even though the move isn’t so much an innovation as it is simply keeping up with its chief rival, it proves that if people get functionality they value sufficiently the service could achieve at least some of Google’s aims.

It’s far too early to know what the outcome of this war of the social networks will be. What’s clear is that in the race of users and their time, Facebook would do well to keep a close eye on that sprinter chasing it down at the far end of the track.