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From plus.google.com: > Google+ is in limited Field Trial Right now, we're testing with a small number of people, but it won't be long before the Google+ proje
by cryptoz 15y ago
From plus.google.com:
> Google+ is in limited Field Trial
Right now, we're testing with a small number of people, but it won't be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we'll make sure you're the first to know when we're ready to invite more people.
WHY?! WHY are they doing this again? They did this with Wave. Google, you cannot launch a social network while explicitly disallowing social networking! This is so frustrating.
- cskau 15y agoWorst part is their sign-up page has gone MIA - 404
- cskau 15y agoIt's back up: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleplus/ https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleplus/ gogogo !
- skbohra123 15y agogives a 500 error
- nuclear_eclipse 15y agoIt also gives an insecure script warning in the latest version of Chrome unstable, which made me laugh since I just started seeing those today.
- rufibarbatus 15y agoWrite only your first name on the "First name" field. I don't know if this is the bug, but after trying three times with my full name, when I did this the 500 went away.
- frisco 15y agoIn fairness, Facebook did the same thing.
- gfodor 15y agoNot all 'private invites' are created equal. Facebook isolated it to a single campus at a time. This meant all your friends were on Facebook, or none of them were. See the difference?
- guywithabike 15y agoNot really. Facebook opened it up to entire colleges at a time. So once you were able to get on, most of your friends were able to, too.
- frisco 15y agoI bet those inside Google+ at this early stage can invite others in as well.
- rubergly 15y agoThere's a very big difference between A) being the only person in, with the ability to invite any of your friends in and B) everyone else already being in. Even if you could invite all your friends in, the only motivation for them to accept and actually join is you (not an entire network yet, until they all accept) which is never going to be enough motivation.
- RobAtticus 15y agoCurrently those inside + at the moment cannot invite others. It will probably change soon, but I think the initial rollouts are still going on, so for the time being I cannot invite others.
- sanderjd 15y agoOut of curiosity, do you know or have a hypothesis for why you were invited? It seems like there are a decent number of people here who have been invited, but many who have not, with a similar trend for #googleplus on twitter, and I've yet to discern a sensible pattern.
- Skalman 15y agoThey're hoping to do the same thing they did with Gmail: use artificial scarcity to their advantage. It'll work if the people there get invites - that way it'll gradually expand until it opens up to everybody.
- joebadmo 15y agoIt's more natural with an email client, though, because email is already federated, so interoperable with the existing email system. This doesn't appear to be.
- veeti 15y ago> Oops... you need a Google Profile to use this feature. Google Profiles is not available for your organisation. Come on, Google!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- joshma 15y agoAccording to Chris Chabot (Developer Advocate at Google), "We're only just starting down the road of the Google+ project, but we love our Google Apps users so please stay tuned" [from comments on http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/google-plus/]
- kelnos 15y agoYeah, this is really annoying. My invite is stuck in limbo right now because it's tied to my Google Apps email address, which won't work with Google+.
- ern 15y agoGoogle recently forced users to make their Profiles public, and announced that it was going to delete private Profiles. If Google+ requires a Profile, then count me out.
- lig 15y agoyep. as we have buzz in several month http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz-coming-soon-for-businesses.html http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz-com... :)
- SashaO 15y agoI found a workaround to bypass this error message: open anybody's profile and "switch accounts" from there. Details at http://codebistro.com/2011/07/09/google-oops-you-need-google-profile-workaround/ http://codebistro.com/2011/07/09/google-oops-you-need-google...
- handrake 15y agoI think Google simply sucks at anything remotely related to social networking.
- haberman 15y ago> WHY?! WHY are they doing this again? Maybe they want to work out the kinks before having 10 million users instantly. The privacy aspect of this will be very important, and the Buzz launch is an example of how opening up to everyone at the same time led to a large backlash.
- msbarnett 15y agoGoogle Buzz is a good example of how forcing an active account on everyone at the same time led to a large backlash. There's a pretty wide gulf between opening up and forcing it on people. You can't build a social networking sites if it isn't open to people in your users' social networks. But you also can't build a site people trust and want to use by forcing it on them.
- nostrademons 15y agoCuriously, I've heard that FaceBook also started by forcing an account on everyone - Zuckerburg scraped the online student database so that everyone at Harvard automatically had a FaceBook account. (Or rather, he scraped it for FaceMash and then used the data again to start FaceBook.) You can get away with a lot more when you're a college student project than when you're a multi-billion-$ corporation.
- nrbafna 15y agoIt is different. Buzz was forced on to anyone who logged into Gmail.
- rhc2104 15y agohttp://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register-for-new-facebook-website/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register... It does not seem like the Facemash data was reused for thefacebook.
- daralthus 15y agoStill I am curious, what circles would I get based on all the data google has ever collected from me.
- wccrawford 15y agoI totally agree. Wave died partially because when I got it, my friends didn't have it. And by the time the last of them got it, the rest of us didn't care any more. Had we been able to all get on at once, we might have found a killer app for it and never given it up.
- yalogin 15y agoWave died because no one (not even developers) understood what it is or what applications could it have outside of mail.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoWave was great for project management. It was project management without the rigid structure.
- huherto 15y agoI am still hoping for something like wave to do organized work.
- william42 15y agoI think there was an open-sourcing of the code behind Wave.
- andrewflnr 15y agoYup, it's in the Apache incubator.
- yesimahuman 15y agoOr the use case centered around friends when really it seemed more suitable for a business network.
- natural219 15y agoThis sentence is baffling to me. Do you not know what Wave does? Really? Or do you NEED a marketing person to tell you how to use a product?
- yanw 15y agoFrom the blog post: That’s the Google+ project so far: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and mobile. We’re beginning in Field Trial, so you may find some rough edges, and the project is by invitation only
- Duff 15y agoIt worked pretty well for Gmail.
- cryptoz 15y agoYour friends didn't need Gmail for you to be able to use it. But they did need Wave. And they do need +. There's a big difference between open protocols and closed systems.
- yannickt 15y agoI also wouldn't be surprised if its launch as an invite-only beta release was in part because of it pioneered large email storage.
- jamesgeck0 15y agoIt appears that you can interact with non-Google+-enabled accounts to a limited extent; they receive your posts as emails.
- PotatoEngineer 15y agoThat might be the point that lets Google+ succeed: you can sign up and interact with your friends immediately, and then when they join Google+, you get to do more. It will definitely help with the "I have an account but nobody else does" phenomenon.
- VishalRJoshi 15y agoGmail concept won't work for plus as what is a social network without a network. If they have load issues they should start with influencers (like they did) and then keep letting them invite their friends. Then their friends can invite their friends and let it grow from the seed. It is wacky that my friends have to get an email update rather than experience the network with me.
- Duff 15y agoUh, what was GMail then? When it first came out, the chosen few got invites, and they invited friends. Rinse, repeat.
- igorgue 15y agoDon't you think it's kinda silly to think these "build hype" signup processes kill products? Github did the same in fact they recommend people to do it, and they're very successful. I agree it's a little frustrating but it's the kind of frustration that makes you go back when the site is open for signups and signup. Nothing bad... Google Wave might just be an exception of this technique and people didn't use it because of the complexity of the product not because it made them wait to get an invite.
- chc 15y agoFor me, it's the kind of frustration that makes me go, "Eh, I feel like I've looked at that before and it annoyed me, though I don't remember why. Probably not worth my time."
- lamnk 15y agoThe social in Github's "Social Coding" is just icing on cake. Their core product is git hosting. People pay them to have private repos. This is not the case with G+ Wave failed exactly because both of its complexity and its artificial scarcity Google created.
- ern 15y agoThe slow release of Gmail accounts was an example of a great hype-building process. OTOH the product was groundbreaking (they offered a huge amount of storage compared to competitors), and it isn't 2004 anymore.
- MaysonL 15y agoWell: when I entered my name & email in the form provided, it got a 500 internal server error. When G's servers are overloaded, you know there's ginormous demand. And you know there're bugs still - they don't even call it beta! it's limited Field Trial. This is the way they rolled out GMail, which seems to be doing ok.
- jleader 15y agoHint to Google: If your servers are overloaded, "Please go back and try again" is a really dumb thing to ask people to do on your 500 error page!
- esrauch 15y agoThey have a kind of loose definition of what they call beta. Consider how long GMail was in "beta" when in reality it was pretty much a finished project. It's true that the invite system worked for gmail, but it's a bit different because gmail still has fundamental value if you are on it and literally none of your friends are.
- joeyespo 15y agoThe only way to get away with this is to provide massive value for those users when nobody else is around. If a social network only becomes valuable when many others are present, then yes, it will most likely fail.
- blago 15y ago"Google, you cannot launch a social network while explicitly disallowing social networking". It worked for Facebook.
- nrbafna 15y agoFacebook's method was different. Though, they launched to limited users at once and expanded, but it was launched to a linked group/college at once. So, they already had people they knew on Facebook.
- nrbafna 15y agoThat is a problem. What is the use of the photo sharing, Hangout is there is no one else to share it with. If Google did not want to launch it to everyone at once, they should have probably gone geographically!
- daralthus 15y agoI am curious what price would an invite hit on ebay.
- nextparadigms 15y agoFacebook sort of did that too, by allowing only college kids at first. I think it's the right idea. It only became stupid with Wave when they started giving out millions and millions of "invites". At that point they should've simply made it public. But really, Wave was a fundamentally flawed project for multiple reasons: bad market fit, clumsy/complex UI, bad marketing, etc. I had a bad gut feeling about it since I saw the demo (which took 1 hour! That should've been a sign) Google+ looks very exciting and it seems like they've addressed many issues social networks have had through out the years, including Facebook. The lack of a Circles like feature was a design flaw of all social networks so far, and I believe it led them to ultimately become irrelevant because of the sheer number of people that became your "friends" on those social networks, which ended up spamming you. Circles seems to fix this, and the other Google+ products looks awesome, too.
- redthrowaway 15y agoMaybe the invites they release will specifically be to people who signed up with gmail accounts that have a significant number of contacts who also signed up. That's what I'd do: do your small scale test, but make it as meaningful as possible with highly connected beta testers.
- vibrunazo 15y agoIt's just an infrastructure problem. Hardware scaling is hard to get right. So it's easier for the engineers to have it released by small increments. This way you can slowly adjust hardware as the need arises. If any problems show up, it will be easier to track it down and fix it.