Those users, however, are not necessarily signing directly into Google +. Instead, they may be signing into one of the services "optimized for" Google+. This includes Gmail and YouTube.
In other words, we still don't have a hard number for Google+ activities. Gundotra defends this calculation. He told moderator and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki that counting only those who sign directly into Google+ is akin to counting only those who view a news stream or those who use "likes." Though Gundotra did not actually mention Facebook by name -- he just called it "a certain competitor" -- it was clear which social network he was talking about.
A recent Comscore report shows users spent an average of 3.3 minutes on Google+ in January compared to 7.5 hours on Facebook.
Kawasaki is a Google+ fan (he just released an ebook on the topic), telling Gundotra that once he started posting publicly to his million-plus followers that it "was like the first time I saw Macintosh."
Gundotra said that what people do not understand is that with Google+, Google is actually building 2.0, in other words this is the next generation of Google as a broad-based service. To illustrate his point, Gundotra showed a 19th century illustration of a duck. He explained that when it was first shown to people they saw a duck, but when it was shown to school children during Easter, they saw a rabbit. "The Idea that we could build a social layer across everything is difficult for people to understand until they use it. ... People continue to see the duck. If you continue to look, you’ll see the rabbit that we’re pulling out of the hat."
That march to the Google 2.0 is not going to stop. "We're just getting started," promised Gundotra. "Wait until you see what we’re bulding next."