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!!
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.
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.
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.
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...
Anyone have an idea on when I can use my "real" e-mail rather than creating a dummy @gmail.com account?
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+.
To be fair - they are. Who provides Google the most money? The unwashed masses seeing adverts and clicking on them. Not people paying for an email service :-)
Obviously this is a simplification - it's the adword customers they care about. Until Google Apps customers are contributing billion+ they probably don't really care that much.
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.
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!
You don't need a + account to read public posts. The included link though appears to be a profile link and not to a specific post so when I clicked on it a different post was at the top of the stream. The following link should go straight to the post in question exclusively: https://plus.google.com/113882113745075873153/posts/Gbg31WL6...
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.
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.
It's like google wants to remind you what search was like prior to their participation. Webmaster forums are particularly funny example of this style of design which is almost aggressively search-unfriendly.
That's your gmail account ID. It hasn't changed since you registered for gmail.
I remember that the old Google profiles (before Google+ and before the Profiles relaunch) had an option to choose between a private and a public profile URL. The public version of the URL had your gmail username in it. The private one didnt, it had the your account ID in it. Apparrently they turned off the option for public profile URLs since Google+.
So apparently these URLs are there for privacy reasons. Not everyone who knows your email address should be able to find your profile.
The option of having your username in the URL is still there, but it looks like the setting needs to be toggled again for the new profile scheme. Check near the bottom on https://profiles.google.com/me/about/edit/d .
Edit: Strangely, the option shows up only sometimes when I click the edit button.
It prevents both information leakage (number of users/posts/etc), and enumeration. It could also contain routing information about where your data is actually stored behind the scenes, avoiding a directory lookup.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
Sometimes following the links from the shared items (if they weren't public) will allow you to create a profile and sometimes it won't. The invite button and interface was up for a very short time and is already gone again so the shared links method is likely the only way to get in at the moment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My point was that Google is putting a lot of effort into competing with Facebook, and that they're willing to use all their other products to succeed with Plus. Think about their bonuses being tied to social, Larry Page as the new CEO, the +1 button in the search results, the renaming of Blogger and Picasa, the redesign of Calender, Gmail etc., the new notification bar accross all Google sites... These aren't just regular product updates, but show how serious Google really is about getting into social, ie keeping facebook at bay.
The problem is Google is at a bit of a disadvantage vs Facebook. Facebook taught us exclusivity is a good thing but by expanding to entire schools at a time they were able to guarantee new users had other in-network friends with Facebook available to them. With + users are relying on people they know to be available to keep the product interesting... A bunch of random people trickling in doesn't necessarily translate to a positive user experience.
The fact that I can invite someone and then they can't get in is ridiculous.
Do you think that person is going to try to get in again later? Probably not. And with only a handful of my invites getting in, my feed might as well be twitter with a lot of big public figures I followed. There's nothing personal there.
It's a stupid way to launch a social service. Social is nothing without my network. So far I have to rate google as still not getting social.
> So far I have to rate google as still not getting social.
Well, they aren't, really. They're just using you to test their system, which I can understand.
Personally, if I got an invite, I'd use it to look around a bit, and then wait for the whole thing to completely open up before actually starting to use it (which would make me a poor tester from Google's perspective).
Well - maybe it's marketing driven. But maybe it's testing driven as they claim. In a way it's a bit catch-22. If they let everyone in - and they run into problems - then they've obliterated themselves instantly. And that's just what happened with Wave. Invites weren't hard to come by... and people just bailed on it and didn't come back.
But not opening it up - as you say - risks expectations that are too high as the buzz continues to build.
Mind you - I never heard anyone complain about the quality of the iphone after they waited in line several days before hand. Not saying the google+ will meet expectations in the same way. But you know - it's seems preferable to have maximal buzz than minimal in just about all scenarios.
There's a difference between queuing for an iPhone and queuing for G+.
When you stand in a queue, you know how long you have to wait. It's fair as everyone knows their position in the line.
G+ is a queue where instead of letting people in according to how long they've waited they pick some people at random from the queue, even if those people have been standing for just a few minutes at the tail of the queue. Nobody knows how long they have to wait.
Limited invites would have been far better - same way they rolled out Gmail. The problem is that the crappy invite system is turning people off - they try their invite, it doesn't work and they don't come back.
I've decided not to bother any more with G+ right now. Maybe I'll come back to it in a few weeks or so but right now it just seems to be full of hard core geeks - the same people I follow on HN or Twitter anyway. None of my immediate friends or family are there so there's very little to keep me there.
I believe Google have honest reasons to limit invites right now. That's understandable.
From a public relations POV though it's very poorly handled. A better, fairer way would be to give each new member 1 or 2 invites, not hundreds or thousands, and ensure those invites work. I've sent invites out to friends and family a week ago and none are working, so they shrug and go back to Facebook - G+ has become last week's wonder.
Most annoying is the continual "invites open now!" posts popping up here and there - and you know that they won't work for you.
Technical issues or not Google could have and should have had a fair and transparent invite system in place.
I don't believe Google are limiting supply to create buzz, but I do believe they are focusing too much on making sure everyone who gets in has a perfect experience in terms of responsiveness and lack of bugs.
Twitter is living proof that if your service is compelling enough people will put up with a LOT of unreliability (and in the context of a network like Twitter, FB, or G+, compelling means 'are there many people I personally want to interact with it on the service'). Will they also put up with a brick wall keeping them and/or their friends and family out (regardless of why it exists)? Will they tolerate the extremely confusing UX (even from a techie's perspective) that goes along with trying to scale that wall? I guess with Google+ we will find out one way or the other.
My main beef with Google+ isn't even that it is limited right now (though that does suck for a 'social network') but rather that the invite system doesn't make any kind of rational sense and the funky way it works isn't properly communicated to users at all.
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"
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.
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!!