2 ms·

Out of pure curiosity, why couldn't Google just invite a few thousand people as a kernel to try things out? Wouldn't be that hard to find a couple of social sup

• esrauch 12y ago
  This is exactly what they did with Wave and is one of the reasons why it failed; you always end up with some group of 8 people that can use the system and 2 people that can't making the entire product useless for collaboration.
• neilk 12y ago
  My information is way out of date, but I believe most Google products are still tested that way. There's a long Googler-only incubation period for everything. And Robert Scoble was probably on Google+ months before you knew about it. The people at Google aren't stupid. They know they need to iterate with customers. But they're iterating towards a very specific event, the day when they turn it on for a billion people in 10 languages. I'm saying that very wide launch makes it kind of sterile. And the drive towards scalability-first probably prevents them from exploring quirkier ideas.