Google+ Upbeat About Beating Facebook Despite Spam Disaster

Google+ sent spammy notifications on Saturday afternoon due to a technical glitch but continues to remain upbeat about beating Facebook and claiming the title of world's No.1 social networking site.

Google+ spammed users on Saturday afternoon due to a technical glitch. Google said the problem was caused by the service having run out of disk space.

Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice-president of social, apologized for the issue on Saturday evening. Gundotra said Google ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence Google’s system continued to try sending notifications over and over again.

Google said it didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but the search engine giant acknowledged that they should have.

Ever since Google launched the test or beta version of Google+ two weeks ago, millions of users have been registered. In fact, Google had to temporarily suspend Google+ invites due to insane demand from the people who wanted to try out Google's latest offering.

Google started the new social networking website on June 28. Invitations to use the service has been sent to press and insiders of Google. Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt told TechCrunch that there are already millions of users of Google+.

Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, estimates the number of Google+ users as 4.5 million. Allen counted surnames present in Google+ and he divided that number by the number of people in the United States who is with that surname. The statistics is based on U.S. Census Bureau.

Google said it is restricting the number of Google+ invites until bugs are fixed and it can ensure that Google+'s infrastructure is reliable and have enough speed to extend its scale.

Google's earlier social network offerings - Google Buzz and Google Wave - failed and when the newly launched Google+ encountered the spam problem just weeks after launching, many thought Google+ would also die a painful death. However, the Internet search giant did not give up and Gundotra said Google+ will be coming out with new changes in response to lots of criticism it has received.

Google is serious about Google+ and though it has a long way to go to catch up with bigger rival Facebook, which boasts of more than 750 million users today, Google+ has made a good start.

Some Google+'s features, such as Circles, Hangouts, Huddle and Sparks have received rave reviews and Google had to even urge businesses to restrain themselves from signing up with Google+ using personal profiles. Google+ will soon be coming out with business profiles suitable for businesses. We have a great team of engineers actively building an amazing Google+ experience for businesses, and we will have something to show the world later this year, Christian Oestlien, a developer on the Google+ project team, said.

In conclusion, it's only a matter of time that Google+ will catch up with Facebook and unless Facebook innovates, Google+ also has the potential to beat Facebook.