Google+ finally opens to the public… but does anyone still care?

Google+ is finally available to all from today, after the social network dropped its 'invite-only' policy that heralded its launch in late June.

Since then, the site has exceeded 25m members and expects to have 100m members by the end of the year.

“For the past 12 weeks we’ve been in field trial, and during that time we’ve listened and learned a great deal," said Google's senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra.

"We’re nowhere near done, but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups,” he wrote on the company blog to announce a new feature for the site.

However, there are signs that the site may be slowing down a lot quicker than expected. According to TIME Magazine's Techland, Google CEO Larry Page hasn't posted a thing for five weeks, while Google+ posts per day fell a staggering 41% from July 19 to August 19, suggesting early adopters of the service have returned to Facebook, which has adopted a few of Google's features in recent weeks.

What do you think? Is Google+ the first major rival to Facebook or a service that will instead be remembered for making Facebook better?