Indian googler

Google+ Inc's new social-networking service may grow to claim 22 per cent of online US adults in a year, passing Twitter Inc and LinkedIn Corp. to be the second- most-used social site after Facebook Inc, a survey found.

Google+ has signed up 13 per cent of US adults and will add 9 percent over the next year, according to the survey from Bloomberg/YouGov. In the same period, Facebook will lose about 2 percentage points of US adults to keep 69 per cent of that population, while Twitter and LinkedIn continue to grow their portion of users.

Started in late June, Google+ is growing faster than Facebook and MySpace Inc. did in their early days. The service, which lets people connect with and manage groups of friends on a website, gained about 25 million users worldwide in less than a month, estimates market researcher ComScore Inc Facebook has more than 750 million active users.

"Google+ is tracing a path similar to Facebook's initial growth -- building excitement in a core group of early adopters," said Michael Nardis, head of YouGov investment products, in a statement about the survey.

Katie Watson, a spokeswoman for Mountain View, California- based Google, declined to comment. Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Facebook, and Matt Graves, a spokesman for Twitter, also declined to comment.