Google+ now counts more than 62 million users, and the company expects to surpass 400 million by the end of 2012.

According to Google’s Paul Allen, Google+ has surpassed 62 million users, and the website is adding 625,000 new users every day. Allen believes the social network, which went live in late June and open to all in September, will have more than 400 million users by the end of 2012. 

Growth has been feast or famine for Google+ since removing the invite-only barrier in September. During its quarterly earnings call, the company projected active accounts at more than 40 million. Since, Google has remained quiet, but Allen’s proclamation, which he made on his own Google+ account, demonstrates that the platform is in a good position to grow rapidly in 2012.

December has been an especially active month for the website, with more than one-quarter of its users creating their accounts this month. Moreover, social media marketing campaigns on the website are becoming more common with Brafton reporting that 77 percent of companies in the global top 100 are using the service.

Allen said that Google expects the API to be used by more developers in the next year to create more apps for the social network.

When Google released the API for Google+ earlier this year, it was available on popular third-party social media applications, such as Involver and HootSuite, Brafton reported. However, Google+ is still not accessible on TweetDeck, the third-party app acquired by Twitter earlier this year. 

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.