After Two Weeks, the 20 Most Popular Profiles on Google+

Google+, the new social network from Google has been live for two weeks now. The site won't be opened to the public until the end of July, at which point Google will rebrand some of its other products to more closely integrate all of its services, but tens of thousands have found their way in through email invitations from the search giant and select users.

Using this invite-only system, Google engineers can closely monitor usage of the service, spot and fix bugs and even put things in lockdown if need be. At one point last week, Google stopped sending invites to new users because demand was just too high.

Now that the floodgates have opened back up, new users are rushing to the service every minute. And then what? There isn't anything to do on Google+, which has been discussed as a potential Facebook killer, unless you have friends and followers. It's only natural that some of the earliest users -- technology personalities and bloggers, mostly -- have quickly amassed huge audiences. I wrote last week that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was the most popular user on Google+ with more than 21,000 followers. Seven days later, that number has grown to more than 110,000, and he remains in the top spot.

But who else is popular on the service? We've pulled the number of friends and followers (as of Sunday evening) for the top 20 users as well as any information they may have entered in Google+'s short "introduction" field. All of this data was provided by SocialStatistics.com, a website created by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, a co-founder of Twitter Counter. It is updated daily.