
G+ invite open again - tushar199
https://plus.google.com/u/0/113882113745075873153/posts/Gbg31WL621X
======
mark_l_watson
I just was able to invite 2 family members, 2 friends, and several people who
posted on my blog asking me how to get invites. I am out of invites now. I
invited people who I thought would really use it.

I must say that Google+ is very well done. I enjoy it every day.

BTW, a little off topic, but I have blasted Google on several occasions about
dropping Google Wave. Turns out I complained for nothing: the latest Wave In A
Box (WIAB) code drop is open source, builds easily, real time sync between
users works very well, and the web UI is similar to the original but simpler
(in a good way). Thanks to the people who did the nice Apache incubator
distro!!

~~~
andrewflnr
I'm glad to hear that Wave is doing well. I thought about grabbing it and
trying it just to see how it was doing and maybe contributing, but just never
had the time. It makes me happy that it has a real chance of survival.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Andrew, give it a try - as I said, really easy to setup. I am thinking of
installing it on one of my customers' LAN for their private use.

~~~
shii
Yep, it's pretty great. We use it internally and it's pretty fantastic.
Curious what XMPP platform you all went with, this was the most difficult part
to implement for us and was a little tedious waiting for the CAs to accept the
certificates and have it all propagate and everything. We're using Prosody
which does have its quirks but maybe there's something better out there.

~~~
shubber
Can't speak to interoperation with WiaB, but I've always been very pleased
with ejabberd. Surprisingly simple to set up and administer, pretty much hands
off once it's up.

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tednaleid
Annoyed that people with a Google Apps account can't join google+, when trying
to join the error message is:

"Oops... you need a Google profile to use this feature."

"Google Profiles is not available for your organization."

This is apparently something that Google has been promising for a while now, I
also recently went through the pain of migrating my domain over to supposedly
link up to Google Profile, but it's still not ready yet:
[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=17b45c62b43447f6&hl=en)

Anyone have an idea on when I can use my "real" e-mail rather than creating a
dummy @gmail.com account?

~~~
ditojim
looks like google is working on this. i think it makes sense to roll this out
to consumers first and harden it for businesses.

[https://plus.google.com/100940716892313727285/posts/Cy9ggc6y...](https://plus.google.com/100940716892313727285/posts/Cy9ggc6yPN3)

~~~
dilap
I dunno, it seems crazy that Google constantly treats their paying customers
like second-class citizens.

~~~
tednaleid
Agreed, the people that have their vanity domains backed by Google Apps are
the hard core user base with lots of influence over other people. The kind of
taste-makers that google desperately wants to get on Google+.

~~~
phamilton
Yeah. The company that should really be freaked out right now is Yammer.

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xelipe
And it's off again. Google has removed the "send invites" features again. They
are controlling the supply so as to create demand.

~~~
MikeCapone
He wrote that they wanted to double the size of the field-trial. Pretty
impressive how fast that happened. When they launch for real, adoption rate
will be crazy, at least for a few days.

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amjith
And it's already closed. Honestly, what's with this stupid game?

~~~
joeguilmette
<https://plus.google.com/113882113745075873153/posts?tab=XX>

not sure if you need an acct to read the post:

Hey Google+ folks!

As I bet you've noticed, we are facing pretty incredible demand for Google+
invites.

As Engineering Director of Google+, I wanted to take a moment to explain why
we're growing the system slowly. First, we want to make sure our
infrastructure scales so the service remains fast and reliable. Second, we
want to ensure that bugs are fixed while there are still a relatively few
people in the field trial.

Things are going well with the systems right now so we feel comfortable enough
to open up invites for a brief period. Our goal is to double the user base in
the field trial. (Sorry, we're not giving details about how many folks are in
the field trial yet).

So, in a few minutes, we'll open up invites again.

We continue to throttle invites, so please don't mass invite folks as it won't
work. If you invite a handful of your most important friends and family you're
much more likely to get these folks into our system.

Thanks again for providing so much wonderful feedback!

~~~
harlowja
Don't use real users as testers, jeesh... Maybe google should invest in some
QA.

~~~
scott_s
Testing at scale without real users is quite difficult. You might as well
limit the number of initial users so that you can try to iron out the worst
bugs before allowing tens of millions of users. Doing a beta for an online
service is standard practice - other websites do it, even online videogames do
it.

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balakk
I'm curious, what's with the cruddy URLs?

For eg: <https://plus.google.com/113882113745075873153>

Why the gargantuan number? Yeah, it's in trial, but still..

~~~
seldo
It's a strange irony that Google, the driving force behind the invention of
SEO, often fail to bother with it themselves, even on extremely high-profile
products.

As noted, Google Profiles have meaningless, unguessable URLs:
<https://plus.google.com/112349855959838705650>

Items in the Chrome app store are similarly opaque:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aidgmjkfmbhldhnhko...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aidgmjkfmbhldhnhkopojimkhhhcpenl)
(As are all Chrome extensions:)
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddngkjbldiejbheifc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddngkjbldiejbheifcmnfmmfiniimbbg)

YouTube videos have no title information at all:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfQhfYA2cH8>

Orkut (a low blow I realize):
<http://www.orkut.com/Main#Profile?uid=16458042622225437726>

News topics:
[http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&...](http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&ncl=djUP_xBOC0jGztMr_kwVTwLB6qkjM&topic=h)

It confuses me.

~~~
true_religion
It's not really surprising that Google doesn't care about SEO---after all they
are _the_ search engine.

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random42
If anyone need an invite, feel free to send me an email for the same. Email is
in the profile.

Edit - I have got around 30 requests. I will process them in FIFO manner, by
the end of the day.

~~~
dawie
I pinged you. Would love an invite.

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cstavish
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of entering my true birthdate when creating
my Google account. I'm under 18, and Google currently is not allowing minors
to use G+. I'm disappointed, but I'm not upset enough to create another
account...Hopefully Google will welcome innocent and vulnerable 17.5-year-olds
like me into the Plus fold reasonably soon.

~~~
klipt
If by soon you mean in six months...

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heresy
If clicking the invite link shows you the capacity reached message, it may
eventually work.

Mine worked 7 days after trying a few times each day :)

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unicornporn
Seriously, I can't find the invite function in UI. Where is it? Do I just add
people to a circle?

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shrikant
This is what I'd been doing:

1\. Go to <https://plus.google.com/circles>

2\. The first rectangle before the listing of your contacts should "Add a new
person"

3\. Enter email address of invitee and hit Enter

4\. Enter a name to associate with above email address, select Circle to add
into, and hit Save

I'm not entirely sure that this is the 'correct' way - I was just looking
around for a place to enter arbitrary email addresses and this seemed like it.
A couple of chaps I'd added this way got in, a couple more had to try a few
times, and most of them see the "we've temporarily exceeded capacity" message.

~~~
Terretta
Once you add people to circles, there's a bar across the bottom of window
offering to explicitly invite those people to Google+.

Click to pop a dialog listing the people as tags or buttons, add more if you
like, then invite.

If you leave and come back, the bar isn't there.

This is the same popup shown by the Invite button on your home page when it's
there, just a different way of reaching it.

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fragsworth
I think they should have given every new account exactly two invites, and see
how quickly it grew from there. Then they probably wouldn't have to shut it
down. That kind of artificial scarcity might have made the invite process a
bit more fun, too.

~~~
r00fus
One invite a day would be more sustainable and get people to actually invite
others.

If I had only two total, I could give it to folks who might ignore the invite,
thus crippling my network (I would more likely end up hacking it by making
numerous fake accounts and harvesting the combined invites... not that organic
or desirable for google).

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arihant
So if I added a Gmail adress in my circle already and the person is not on G+
yet, shouldn't Google send invites to those people first? The people who are
in circles but not on G+, that is.

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dasil003
Ugh, I have an email titled "... invited you to join Google+" but it's really
just a bunch of shared items and clicking them doesn't let me in.

Anyone care to invite me? gabriel.d@gmail.com

~~~
pilgrim689
I noticed that a stored cookie was preventing me from signing in g+ after
being invited. I opened an incognito window and voilà! I was able to sign in
:) Maybe this applies to your case?

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vessenes
That was an incredibly fast double in terms of user size. Lots of pent-up
demand; I know I'd really like for more friends and family to be on.

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dendory
Am I the only one finding this whole thing fairly uninteresting? It's not like
if it was a brand new, revolutionary service. Now I'm not knocking off Google
Plus, but it is just a Facebook clone, perhaps better, but all this buzz
around how invites are limited and everyone wants to get in seems like an
attention grabber more than anything else.

~~~
mindotus
People are always looking for the next "new thing" and of course want options
as well imo.

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statictype
Has anyone looked at the source html of the Google+ pages? Anyone have any
clue what's going on there?

Is this the output from some compiler (Which apparently is generating the css
along with the html) or some obfuscation technique?

~~~
Cacti
Compiler used to compress the size before it's actually compressed in
transmission. No reason to send "here-is-the-table-id-we-want-for-the-form"
when you can just send "t-f-4"---the browser obviously doesn't care.

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hallowtech
You can invite people by adding their email/gmail as a person to share a post
with on your stream. You don't need a send invite button. I was able to invite
ppl even when it was supposedly closed last week.

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orionlogic
With all the hype aside, what's the real value proposition in one sentence?

~~~
lhnz
Group video chat with distinct circles of friends.

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Tichy
Until everybody can use it freely, there is no point to a social network.

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Caballera
hmm I don't see a invite link to send invites out.. where is it?

~~~
ktsmith
It was in the right hand corner under the "go mobile" section. However it only
lasted about thirty minutes.

~~~
X-Istence
Lasted about 3 hours for me. Invited a bunch of new people, was awesome.

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robinduckett
Annoyingly, I have an invite, but it won't let me sign up :(

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JacobIrwin
If you would like a friendly entrepreneur to be in one of your circle please
send me an invite: jacobalexirwin at gmail dot com

And maybe you'd like to know a bit about me here first: linkedin dot
com/in/jacobirwin

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habitatforus
Invites are Google's way of creating exclusivity, like only allowing
harvard.edu addresses ... Facebook.

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ck2
Am I just old or is anyone else completely uninterested in Google+ ?

Why is Google going to be any less evil than Facebook (or Twitter) ? Hasn't
everyone read some of the infamous yet numerous quotes from Eric Schmidt
(Google CEO, anti-privacy, unless it's his income/house data) ?

This is any antagonistic law enforcement's wet dream - all cloud data is
legally accessed without warrants or notification these days - hey this person
protested at an anti-war rally or the DNC/RNC conventions: let's lookup all
their circles and put them on the no-fly list just to be careful. What would
not have happened years ago because of the cost is now super-easy because
you've spoon-fed it to them.

Or am I just old?

~~~
bh42222
I am completely uninterested in Facebook, twitter and all that came before.
And I am old.

But recently almost everyone around my age and younger has joined
Facebook/twitter/etc. And I keep waiting for this to end, for people to become
bored with it, but it seems the world is moving away from face to face and
voice communication.

It seems everyone is moving to web based social interaction. I remember when
only the biggest geeks at my university preferred on-line chat over face to
face interaction. But that time, our old timer's time, seems to be passing.
And social networking is now how people keep in touch, how they maintain a key
element of their social sphere.

And I've noticed it when even friends my age have organized things on facebook
and then apologized to me since because I'm not on facebook, they briefly
forgot I exist.

Or I'd like to believe them, that's what really happened ;)

I'm in no rush to join G+ (I keep typing "++"!) And if/when I do, I'll
probably keep my circles very tight. But speaking as an old guy, the more time
goes by the more I accept the reality that social networking is becoming part
of our culture, just like the telephone once did.

But I could do with a bit fewer news items about G+ per day.

P.S.

(I also get a lot of crap from my friends for not carrying a cell phone.)

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johnx123-up
Good marketing strategy.

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nikcub
how do you send invites ?

~~~
haakon
Who the heck knows. I think adding an email address to your circles and then
sharing something with them will trigger an email notification that doubles as
an invite that works whenever new signups through invites are enabled, which
isn't often. If anyone has better insight, please let me know.

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AwesomeTogether
someone please send me an invite

awesometogether@gmail.com

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trezor
Might just be me, but with Google opening and closing invitations like this
all the time, it's not even "like Gmail all over again". It's much worse. With
Google creating this much artificial scarcity to bring buzz, demand and
publicity, they are really creating immense expectations and putting
themselves up for slaughter.

People are going crazy right now trying to get invites, to find the invites
closed, their received invites not working because it's closed again, etc etc.
People are putting up lots of work to get in, and the more work Google make
people put in, the better the product needs to be.

The buzz around G+ is also just insane. People are creating news websites,
tutorial websites and twitter-accounts for G+. People are gaming others to
like and follow them on twitter and facebook(!) to get G+ invites (makes
sense, eh?). There are already several third-party URL-shorteners dedicated
for G+. Why exactly? If G+ is going to be huge, who cares about twitter's 140
char limit? The buzz-machine is working like crazy and people are desperately
trying to cling on to what's hot right now, even though it doesn't internally
or externally make any sense. Expectations are way high and are still going
up, up trough the roof.

G+ seems 100% marketing-driven at this point, just look at the demo-material.
In the Circles video they even say "You take a chance on people, because they
take a chance on you". For a feature which lets you put a user in a list. This
is Apple-grade marketing BS, so it's hard to not think the overall deployment
strategy with the associated buzz is intentional.

I'm however starting to doubt if G+ will be able to deliver on the
expectations being created for it. They are just going way too high now.

Although probably not as bad, this is definitely moving into Wave-land. People
had to go trough hell and back to get Wave-invites, but they went trough
whatever crazy means they had to, and once they got there the response was
"This is it"?

Unless G+ can really deliver, it might end up the same.

~~~
Daniel14
I can't help but feel like they _really_ want this to succeed, and are betting
the entire company on it. From what I've heard, Google+ has to potential to
turn out huge. And making sure there aren't any bugs before letting everybody
in is simply a must for them - They just can't afford to have any problems
with this last attempt at social.

I also think the hype you're talking about only happens in a very small group
of geeks. The average guy on the street still hasn't heard of Google+, and
until he has and is willing to try it out, Google will lose the social war.
Convincing the fb masses to bother is an extremely difficult task, and Google
will need all the hype it can get. Right know, I think they're doing exactly
the right thing.

~~~
jrockway
_are betting the entire company on it_

So you're saying that if people don't like Google Plus, they are going to stop
clicking AdWords, move their email to Hotmail, and start using Yahoo for
search? That seems very unlikely to me.

This is just a regular product launch. It gets a lot of hype because people
like their friends but hate Facebook.

~~~
rogercosseboom
I think what the comment was referring to was that, in Google's view, the
social market is becoming more and more important to the greater internet
community. Not having a viable product in this space could cost Google dearly
later– specifically in those areas you sarcastically mentioned.

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clistctrl
I wish I had Google's problems. "We have too many people who want our service,
yes we currently have sufficient infrastructure, and yes we designed it to
scale form day 1, but its not completely tested yet... fortunately you guys
will wait for me to be comfortable"

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tomjen3
Google really needs to get their shit together and let anybody in. Facebook
does it, and Google will loose unless we can migrate our entire social graph.

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galenweee
please invite me! galenjr@gmail.com <3?

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tushar199
I have some invite left, send me your mail id from my profile or via contact
from my website. (both in my about)

~~~
mbesto
I sent you a mail via your contact page. Thanks!

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tony_landis
Would love an invite: tony.landis at gmail

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thedangler
Can someone please hook me up? matty69@gmail.com Thank you

Who ever sent me the invite. I have no idea what to click. I follow the post
link and all i get is a 404 error :) Thanks for trying

~~~
gommm
Same here, I'd love an invite... email: hn@gom-jabbar.org

~~~
balu1102
send it here too, wud love to get the first feel.. sbaldeep@gmail.com

