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The thing with Harvard Facebook is that it's a predefined social circle that came online as a unit. If you go to Harvard, most of your friends and people you re
by imgabe 7y ago
The thing with Harvard Facebook is that it's a predefined social circle that came online as a unit. If you go to Harvard, most of your friends and people you regularly interact with are also going to Harvard, so you have a cohesive group altogether.
With Google+, invites were more or less random, so in a group of 5 friends maybe 3 got one and 2 didn't. Were the 3 people who got invites supposed to just drop their other 2 friends? Obviously people aren't going to do that.
People do like things that are exclusive, but they want to exclude outsiders, not their friends.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe early G+ was similar in regards to early Slashdot or Reddit: Tech / SV insiders, Googlers and Xooglers and their extended notworks. Expanding beyond this, especially to Google's other natural affinity group, advertisers and marketers, did far more harm than good to the service IMO. The actual invite-only period only lasted a few months -- it was general-access by late September 2011: https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/tech/web/google-plus-public/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/tech/web/google-plus-public/i... Facebook's closed period lasted years.