Earlier today, Google announced that they had acquired iPad app of the year Snapseed and its makers NIik Software. As a part of that announcement, Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra posted a welcome message to Nik software, and inside that message he divulged some Google+ statistics.

Mainly, Google+ now has over 400 million registered users and over 100 million monthly active users. He clarifies that that includes both desktop and mobile users.

Welcome Nik Software!

Today I’m excited to welcome +Nik Software to the Google family! We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone. Check out the examples from some of the world’s greatest photographers, and you’ll see what I mean.

This week we also hit an important milestone–over 400,000,000 people have upgraded to Google+. It was only a year ago that we opened public sign-up, and we couldn’t have imagined that so many people would join in just 12 months. While Google+ is all about creating a better experience across Google, it’s also a destination. And here too, I’m happy to report that we have just crossed 100,000,000 monthly active users on Google+ (plus.google.com and mobile app).

It seems like Google+ has been fighting off proclamations of its utter demise before it even launched, and even with hundreds of million of users has been labeled a “ghost town.”.

Strangely enough, at this year’s Google I/O back in June, Gundotra announced 250 registered users and 150 million monthly active users for Google+. So, at first glance it would appear that someone screwed up the metrics at some point. But according to Gundotra, the I/O figures included gmail users who used circles or people that simply +1’ed something.

This time, the 100 million MAUs only refer to those who access plus.google.com and use the mobile app.

By comparison, Facebook has reported nearly 1 billion MAUs, which means that Google+ is roughly one tenth the size of Facebook. A few months ago, Twitter announced 140 million active users. So, if we’re going by the networks’ own claims, Google+ is still chasing.

But a ghost town? Hardly.