G+ invite open again
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
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!!
"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?
https://plus.google.com/100940716892313727285/posts/Cy9ggc6y...
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.
I use google@mydomain.com
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!
I've been clicking on the G+ invite you sent me days ago to no avail.
=T
For eg: https://plus.google.com/113882113745075873153
Why the gargantuan number? Yeah, it's in trial, but still..
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... (As are all Chrome extensions:) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddngkjbldiejbheifc...
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&...
It confuses me.
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.
Edit: Strangely, the option shows up only sometimes when I click the edit button.
Edit - I have got around 30 requests. I will process them in FIFO manner, by the end of the day.
Mine worked 7 days after trying a few times each day :)
But it looks like this doesn't work anymore.
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.
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.
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).
Anyone care to invite me? gabriel.d@gmail.com
Is this the output from some compiler (Which apparently is generating the css along with the html) or some obfuscation technique?
And maybe you'd like to know a bit about me here first: linkedin dot com/in/jacobirwin
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?
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.)
awesometogether@gmail.com
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.
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.
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).
And G's announced goal of minimizing bugs (as the user base scales) seems legit.
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.
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 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.
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.
At least the bonus structure for employees is tied to meeting the company goals on social: http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/08/larry-page-google-reorg/
So yes, Page has spun the ship's wheel... expect the boat to turn sharply.
Oh dear God do I get sick of hearing complaints about the "illusion of scarcity" every time somebody can't get something obviously in demand.
Do you have any idea how many moving parts there are to something like this?
The only message I get from your post is that you can't separate your opinion from reality (like so many others).
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.
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.
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