With all the hype surrounding google+ it's a crying shame it's not openly available. Within a couple of days my interest will have subsided and it will be nothing but a distant memory .. which I can imagine will be the case for a lot of people.
Hopefully if it is any good, it will claw it's way back into the media spotlight, but how many people will try for a second time to sign up. IMHO the invite only plan will kill it before it gets any kind of real traction.
Edit: I'm aware gmail done well using invite only to begin with. But gmail was a leap ahead of it's competitors.
Agreed, and the 'gmail did this' argument fails. If gmail was only substantially useful with other gmail users, a slow launch would not have made any kind of sense.
About the only justification for a slow launch is to avoid buggering up the scaling or having the entire world discover some massive UX flaw almost immediately - so it's tough for them. I hope they hit a good balance.
It started to get overloaded and throw errors right before they shut down email invites again last night, so I think they're likely trying to scale up as quickly as they can.
I haven't seen any hype surrounding google+ except for HN and other similar communities. I don't think the regular FB user is even aware that google+ is in testing phase, or that google is even working on anything like it.
Heck, how many have heard of google wave outside of the geek circle?
I've been sent an invite, thanks to whoever sent that, but it turns out I can't use the damn thing because I have a google apps account set up for my domain, just like everyone else here probably does.
Plus requires a google profile in order to use it, and Apps accounts can't have profiles. Apparently someone from google has said this will be coming "soon."
WTF google? Hasn't it occurred to you that the set of power users/evangelists/early adopters and the set of people who have their own apps account on their domain might overlap a bit?
This isn't so much dropping the ball, it's bordering on an own goal.
Any googlers reading this: sort it out. Or go and bother the nearest person responsible for sorting it out, lest my disappointment spill over into murderous rage.
I used to think that it matters, but you can create circles with people who don't have plus (as long as you have their email) so I don't think it will hamper adoption.
Making it invite-only forces people to talk about it. Gmail's slow launch was done really well, and probably drove interest more than harmed it. If Google handles this well, the same thing could happen for Google+.
I definitely agree. Google+ isn't that revolutionary that people will continue talking about it months from now when it's open to the public. They should've made it open to anyone and capitalized on all the press happening.
And I don't think Google+ will come anywhere close to overthrowing Facebook. Yes, the circles thing sounds cool and all, but it sounds cool to us rationalized hackers. For normal people, they just want a place to see what others are up to, to showcase their narcissistic profile, and to make witty comments. That's all. We don't need Circles. We don't even care about privacy.. it's just something us geeks cry about. The one thing Google probably didn't give as much thought to is how the user profile will look like. They probably put too much effort on the Circles feature.. well the Circles feature ain't gonna help make you look good to other people.. a fancy profile page will though, so there goes your traction.
Hopefully if it is any good, it will claw it's way back into the media spotlight, but how many people will try for a second time to sign up. IMHO the invite only plan will kill it before it gets any kind of real traction.
Edit: I'm aware gmail done well using invite only to begin with. But gmail was a leap ahead of it's competitors.