When Google revealed its new social project, namely Google Plus and everyone wanted to be invited to the party. That’s how Google has usually rolled out services since they launched Gmail. When Gmail was newly launched by Google, having a Gmail account became quite important for people.
If interest and exclusivity are benchmarks, then Google + is scoring high. I have used Google+ for a couple of days now and one thing I found missing on it was the lack of invitations.
Even now the go around for inviting people is to add them to Circles and then send them a message. Usually they should be able to sign up to Google Plus. But this is taking a lot of time, possibly because of overload.
A social network without your friends is boring!
- I used to be on Orkut a lot, about 5 years ago. I resisted Facebook thinking none of my friends are on it. Today almost everyone I know in life is on Facebook and all my friends who I would catch up on Orkut have either deleted their Orkut profile or like me do not check it more than once or twice a month.
- Users need to have their friends get access to their photos and updates and leave their comments.
- Google Plus does work around the problem by allowing ‘Sharing via email only” option which updates people via an email about stuff shared on the Google + account. This allows only viewing of updates and photos and email users cannot leave their comments.
Hopefully, Google+ rolls out invites very fast and stop faltering on this issue. Remember what happened to Google Wave. It was a collaborative tool meant for teams. As individuals who got the invite could not find people they worked on Google Wave, they found it quite useless despite of Google Wave having some really cool features.
What do you think? Will the lack of invitations and too much exclusivity kill Google+ before it starts? Do drop in your comments.
4 Comments
I think it would be nice if Google just set a limit for invitations a user can send, like 5 per user/per week. But then they would have to find a way to prevent people from selling these invitations on eBay.
I think they will need to open the doors quickly because currently there is a lot of excitement about Google plus.
@ Tahsin
Selling Invitations in eBay is really funny. The most funny aspect is the people who buy it, pity for them 🙂
I like their strategy, the idea of gradually increasing social to their system is the way to go, it’s too late to try to invent a new Facebook