Hitwise: Top 10 Social Networking Sites in the United States

The latest statistics released on Monday by Experian Hitwise (hereinafter referred to as "Hitwise"), an American Internet traffic monitoring agency, show that based on user visits, Google's Google+ social networking service has entered the top ten social networking sites in the United States.

Top 10 social networking sites (or forums) in the United States according to Hitwise

Google announced last Tuesday that it has added nine new features to its Google+ service and opened registration to all the public. The new features include support for mobile devices in the video chat function "Hangout". In addition, Hangout also added screen sharing and support for Google Docs office documents.

According to the latest statistics from Hitwise, Google+ had 15 million visits from US users last week, ranking eighth among the top 10 social networking sites in the US, just behind Myspace. Hitwise data does not include users who use mobile devices to access social networks. In the previous week, Google+ had 1.1 million visits, ranking 54th among US social networking sites.

SAI noted that in July this year, Google+ had 1.8 million weekly visits, which ranked it at No. 42. Hitwise's latest statistics show that traffic to the service had indeed declined before Google opened Google+ to the public last week. In contrast, Hitwise data also showed that Facebook had 1.75 billion visits from U.S. users last week.

Last month, Google announced that Google+ has added support for several games. At that time, only Rovio (note: the developer of the game "Angry Birds") and several other casual game developers were invited to participate in the press conference. SAI cited an insider last week saying that Google+ will open its API to game developers on a large scale in November this year. Industry insiders predict that by then, a large number of game developers will provide game software for Google+, and the number of Google+ users will also increase significantly.

Appendix: Top 10 Social Networking Sites (or Forums) in the United States as Statisticed by Hitwise

1. Facebook

2. YouTube

3. Twitter

4. Yahoo Answers

5. Tagged

6. LinkedIn

7. Myspace

8. Google+

9. myYearbook

10. iVillage