On Feburary 7th, 2011, the entire Gawker Media style changed from a typical one you’d see on a blog to a hipper more programmed feel. The design focused on a top story and then listed out others along the side in a static bar.

Some people called it horrific, some used the word “satanic“. Well all of those negative words about Gawker’s redesign can probably be put to rest.

According to a few tweets from Gawker head honcho Nick Denton today, the network saw a lift of over 10 million monthly unique visitors from this point last year:

Yep, January’s in. 35.6m people globally: tinyurl.com/janglobal Interesting: no lift from trade shows. yfrog.com/mmg26xp

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

For obsessive Gawker watchers and redesign doom-mongers: the 35.6m uniques in Jan 2012 is record and 55% up from last April’s nadir.

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

It seems like the redesign didn’t scare people away after all, as you can tell by the graph that Denton includes with this tweet. With 35.6m unique visitors in January, the network just saw its best traffic ever.

So just when you think something is so radical and can’t work simply because it’s different, remember Gawker’s redesign. It actually worked.

Numbers are so fascinating aren’t they? They tell a story about the growth of a product, but they don’t tell the whole story. It’s easy to judge something based on how many people use it, but the thing about numbers is that they’re completely subjective and only matter to the people who are working on that service.

Of course, Google‘s foray into social networking is going to be judged against the growth and size of Facebook. There’s no doubt about it that Facebook is massive. With over 800 million users, the social network is the service to beat.

But I’d like to share one more series of numbers with you:

Yep, Facebook launched publicly on 9/26/06. That’s over five years ago, which is quite a head start. So let’s forget about numbers, and talk about three reasons why Google shouldn’t share any at all, for now.

1. It doesn’t have to

Even though tech blogs like TechCrunch were covering Facebook back in 2006, they had no real competition. Sure, the comparisons against MySpace were there, but Facebook was and is something completely different. It wasn’t a service to peacock and show off like MySpace was. It was for you and your real friends.

Facebook started sharing numbers as it was raising money, because it had to. The only way to get investors all hot and bothered about your startup is to show your growth by numbers. Active users mean a higher valuation, higher profile investors, and bigger investments.

Google is fine with money, they’re not looking for investment. They’re not under the gun to share numbers to prove anything to anyone. Yes, they’re a public company and are held accountable as such, but the incremental reporting of milestones isn’t necessary like it is for a company still seeking cash.

2. What people are doing will guide how many will do it

Google is in a great position to tinker with its service, which I think is superior to Facebook in a few ways. One of these ways is privacy. The idea of Circles is way easier to grock than Facebook’s granular privacy settings. By focusing on who you want to share with, rather than who you don’t want to share with is quite brilliant, and something Facebook is yet to accomplish with its list feature. Even Sean Parker agrees.

Google+ has a hit with Hangouts, which has made video chats social, something not even Facebook and Skype could do. I think focusing on making Hangouts even better, rather than sharing how many users you have, is a way better use of time. A great product will bring more great users, Facebook knows that firsthand.

3. It’s just a distraction

We know how much mileage Facebook got out of announcing its 500 million users. It was plastered on movie posters for “The Social Network” and was repeated by mainstream press outlets from the U.S. to Zimbabwe. But those mainstream press outlets don’t get into Facebook in detail. Sure, once in a while they’ll talk about a hot privacy story, or where Mark Zuckerberg went on his holiday.

Google doesn’t need press, it gets enough. I truly believe that the company is laser-focused on building a social glue to all of its products, including search, YouTube, and Email. Google+ isn’t so much a destination as it is an infrastructure to share information and interact with and manage the contacts that you’ve cultivated over the years.

Let’s judge Google+ based on its features

Instead of numbers, which you won’t get officially unless it’s from Google themselves, why not focus on what Google is actually doing with social. Don’t get hung up on how many people use it or how fast they adopt it, because only Google knows. And they’re not sharing it.

And if you’re still wrapped up in numbers, remember these:

8/20/11

That’s right, Google+ went public only a little over 4 months ago.

In a blog post entitled “The Vision Behind Klout“, Klout‘s CEO and Co-Founder Joe Fernandez tries to explain the background behind why he started the service in the first place.

While every startup has a story, the CEO of Klout’s story revolves around an obsession with data, and an immersive and personal social media story:

I started Klout in my bedroom almost four years ago while recovering from jaw surgery. During that time, I depended entirely on social media for communication. My goal was and is to create a system that recognizes people for the power of their voices on social media. I see Klout as a great equalizer for the normal person utilizing social media. Every day we are segmented by nearly every company we come into contact with. Usually this is based on how much money we spend; the level of service we receive is determined by the size of our wallets.

Personally? I call bullshit. Not that Fernandez didn’t have his jaw wired shut, because he did. I call bullshit because Klout isn’t about individual voices, it’s about bubbling up opportunities for brands to spread their seed amongst a population of millions using the internet to talk about stuff.

Brands don’t want individuals to advertise to or reward, they want bunches of them at a time to make it worth their while. And that’s fine, it’s how advertising works. In the same way that Budweiser wouldn’t make a million dollar commercial for the Super Bowl in hopes of four or five people watching, Klout is not pulling data together on three or four amazing tweeters for Pepsi to advertise to.

Breaking up with early adopters

Early adopters on the web are very “me-centric” people, for the most part. The goal of an early adopter is to show that they’re an early adopter and then be a part of the growth of a service. It’s kind of like being a fan of a band very early on. Eventually you end up not agreeing with the direction the music is going, and you move onto the next potentially hot band so that you can tell your friends that you “found them first”.

That’s not Klout’s game at all. Klout cares about data, not about people. That simple fact is why early adopters need to just move on to something else, because Klout doesn’t want to hear your complaints about why your score is down. In fact, nobody does. So shut up.

Klout is going after middle-American novice tweeters who might have mentioned a body spray once or twice. With its service, Axe could reach people like that directly in large bunches and give them samples of new products.

How do we know this? Because Klout recently changed its scoring algorithm. People absolutely lost their minds in the comments on the post and on Twitter.

This type of comment was posted over and over again there:

Very unhappy with this change. My score went from 73 down to 53. 20 point drop. I’ve been working for months to increase my Klout score. Please fix this.

This is proof that people who are “working” on being relevant shouldn’t use any type of service. As my good friend Alex Hillman says and has tattooed on his arm, “JFDI”. Just do it, and don’t worry about what you’re getting out of it, and all will be fine.

There is a business model here

As with any rewards program, there are going to be happy and mad people. But for the most part, when you get a reward from say, an airline, you’re pretty excited about it. A reward should feel like a gift. It’s a gift to get you to spend more money, sure, but it’s a gift none the less.

The problem with Klout users, which isn’t a problem of Klout in and of itself, is that people expect something for using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and foursquare. And it’s absolutely absurd.

What Klout is doing is taking a ton of data, and putting an arbitrary score next to people’s names. I choose not to pay attention to it because I could care less what a service thinks about how I talk and communicate with people. Meaning, I don’t use the internet to “work towards” anything. It’s not work to me, it’s how I choose to live my life.

Further proof that “social influence” is a real business, is that others are getting into the game and throwing money at the opportunity to capitalize on all of this data. For example, Peoplebrowsr made a big deal about a new service called “Kred“, which still hasn’t launched yet.

I think if everyone stepped back for a second and looked at Klout just like you would any other business, you’d see that what they’re doing isn’t anything new. The anxiety and angst it’s causing is, but that comes with the territory on any new market.

Like our own Brad McCarty said, the problem with social influence is us.

After all, it’s only numbers.

If you’re an author and decided to take the markup steps that Google+ announced a while back, your Google+ follower numbers are showing up next to your profile in Google search results.

In June, Google explained the new markup language this way:

We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

A source confirmed that the next step of that feature, actually showing the number of Circles you’re in on Google+ in Google search results has been turned on.

The results look something like this, so if you’re searching for people or content on Google, you may spot this in the wild:

If you’d like to add this information to your site or blog to have the number of Circles you’re in to show up in results too, Google has set up a help center area to give you a hand.

While this is great for authors, we think that most Google+ users would want to turn this on for themselves, so hopefully Google makes that a feature for all soon, without having to do any coding on a website.

Would you even want this information to appear in Google search results or would it creep you out? Let us know in the comments.

Found this great infographic about Skype on meet the boss