Do you want to guess, ironically, who, up until recently, had the most followers on Google’s new social network, Google+? Go ahead....take a guess.

Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, THAT Mark Zuckerberg: the youthful founding father of Facebook, Google’s new arch-nemesis on the social networking front, is the most-followed person on Google+.

At the launch of Google+, Zuckerberg and Google’s two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, clearly had the most followers, as you could see when you logged in. Zuckerberg, however, had by far the most. Then, this week a rather mysterious change happened: Zuckerberg, Brin and Page all activated their privacy settings so that you can no longer see how many followers each have.

The three accounts went private all at the same time, which is a little weird: theoretically, the privacy setting needs to be engaged by the user himself or herself. At the time Zuckerberg’s account “went private” reported PC Mag’s Peter Pachal, Zuckerberg had about 35,000 followers. By now, that number is likely to be higher.

In early July, reported Pachal, Zuckerberg was atop the list at socialstatistics.com with 29,543 followers. Page landed in second place with 19,878, and Brin was fourth with 15,636. The number two spot was held by Vic Gundotra, SVP of social for Google. The rest of the list read “like a who’s who of tech geeks and media people, with This Week in Tech’s Leo Laporte, TechCrunch’s MG Seigler, and Mashable’s Pete Cashmore all placing in the top 25,” wrote Pachal.

Always happens that way. The cool kids always get there first.

Google is now saying that Google+ has in excess of 10 million members and climbing, though the network is still in beta testing.

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