I'm apparently in. If you want an invitation, I can "add you to a circle", which I think will generate an invitation. PM me with your email address (or just post here) if interested. So far, I'm ... nonplussed.

Interesting... I've never heard of it, 'til now. After taking their tour I have to admit being rather nonplussed, too.

I'll try it out. Anything that threatens the world domination of Zuckerbook is worth supporting, IMHO.

(tonycpsu) (at) (gmail)

Okay Tony, I've "added you to one of my circles", which may or may not generate some sort of invitation for you.

Try me-
stewbrownsays gmail

Hmm, I really wonder if this is going to gain enough traction to really take off. I do think the competition is good. But how many little icons are we going to see at the bottoms of ads now?

Orkut anybody?

It's a bit surprising to me that Google+ isn't particularly well integrated with Buzz. For example, Buzz has all kinds of import features, e.g., from Twitter, but there's nothing like that for Google+, and Buzz posts don't automatically end up on your Google+ wall posting tab.

What's clear is that they're trying to match or exceed all of the various Facebook features. Picture sharing and tagging. Etc. There are a couple new and very good things. They've got multi-user video conferencing. They've got multi-user mobile-phone instant messaging (but not integrated with Google Talk). They've got sharing of favorite posts (but not integrated with Google Reader).

So, as it turns out, "adding you to my circle" is not the same thing as "inviting you to Google+". For those of you to whom I over-promised, I'm sorry. You'll get in eventually. Somehow. In the meantime, here's pretty much all you need to know.

Wave's failure, IMO, stemmed largely from "hey, this could be cool, but no one else has it" and then the early adopters gave up. Google+ so far seems to be making the same mistake, tho it would seem to matter slightly less.

I'd definitely like an invite! I'm as big a fan of Google as you'll meet, but I'm skeptical about the future of this one...

If, at some point, I get true "invitations" to hand out, I'll post something here. Right now, I'm afraid, I have nothing. (I thought I did, but I didn't.)

You know, Microsoft has this Live thing, and it's got social features that are similar to Facebook

It does ? Last time I looked Live was a bunch of barely related services under the same name with very little integration between them, let alone social features.

It's a little more integrated now, but not a whole lot, and it sucks ass. (I'm forced by my company to use the messenger for "internal" IM.)

I was exposed to some of it when I tried out my Windows Phone 7 a few months back. I'd sign in and check now, but for some reason it's rejecting the password my IM client is using right now to access Windows Live Messenger. There was a place to upload photos, status postings, longer blog style posts, manage contacts/groups, and Messenger was used for IM style chat.

And yes, it seemed to be pretty disconnected from everything else and internally held together with a bit of duct tape. There wasn't even a way to integrate "Windows Contacts" with "Windows Live Contacts".

My comment though was mostly a friendly jab at Tony, wondering why he wasn't a Live user yet if he wanted to support something other then Facebook

Unless there is a single web page that you can point me at that shows me all that data in one place it is neither:

a) social
b) in any way anything like Facebook

Did I mention that Google+ doesn't appear to integrate with Google Reader or Google Buzz? Google+ also seems to have its own chat thing (video chat in the browser plus group-IM for smartphones) that appears to be unrelated to Google Talk.

I find this baffling since Buzz got this right (or, at least, less wrong) from day one.

http://home.live.com is apparently it. Can't check on the current state, since my passport login that is working just fine for messenger isn't working on any other MS services. They must have taken a page out of Google+'s book and turned it all into invite only

Yahoo also has its 'Updates' service where you can 'get connected' to various contacts. I see a couple of my friends posting stuff on there, but mostly I ignore it.

Ironically the entire contents of home.live.com for me are updates telling be about all the stuff that my friends have shared with me on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and MapMyRide...

Update: now they're allowing people with accounts to invite more people. I've now invited all of you who've mentioned your interest here or via PM. We'll see what happens.

Even if this is better than Facebook the problem will be Facebook has even people who barley can use a computer signed up like some of my family. I will still have to use Facebook if I want to interact with them then I would be maintaining two things.

Google's overall strategy is clearly that they want to flat-out kill Facebook in the same way that Facebook flat-out killed MySpace. You can't fault them for ambition.

Meanwhile, the amusement of the day: Randall Munroe (xkcd.com), changed his profile photo to be the generic Facebook icon. This caused one of the Google+ devs to follow up "I was halfway into investigating this as an ACL bug before I realized."

Thanks, Dan. I'm in!

To that I say "good luck with that." Not going to happen. The only thing that wouldn't surprise me is to find out that Google is shutting this down sometime down the road because it didn't pan out as they'd hoped.

But I can see why they're making this play. For many people, Facebook might as well be an alternative to the internet. For years I've compared them to AOL, where loads of members just sign in and don't do anything else with their connection. These people will search for this or that on Facebook and consume all their content there. Plenty don't ever visit google.com. I don't know of any other site that has (ever) had this AOL effect on any significant number of people.

Is Google+ a better Facebook? It's going to need to be a whole lot better to knock Facebook off its perch, and it's not like Facebook is standing still. One prong is clearly the video "hangout" feature, which apparently allows others to join in arbitrarily, if you publicize the "hangout" to the public. They're trying to one-up Facebook on time wasting. That's pretty audacious all by itself.

One interesting data point comes from a buddy of mine who's a whole lot younger. He complained "Facebook is where all my high school friends are" (who he apparently doesn't want to deal with). He prefers Twitter, otherwise, because that's where his current friends and colleagues are.

It's also interesting to see how LinkedIn has somehow survived by positioning themselves as the place where you link with your "professional" colleagues (and where they've also tried to clone the Facebook experience).

Will Google win? I have no idea, but it's interesting to see what happens when Google sets their corporate might at attacking a problem.

It can be 100x better and still not make a dent at all in Facebook. I don't think it's going to achieve critical mass. It's like jumping back to 2002 and trying to beat eBay. No one could have done it then. Google would be better off waiting around for a potential social-esque collapse. Not going to happen any time son, but imagine all the millions they'd save.




Do you mean to say that LinkedIn has changed up its site to more closely match Facebook or are you implying LinkedIn in itself has always been modeled after Facebook? Because it predates Facebook by at least a year and was already popular in professional circles before Facebook had much of any following at all. AFAIK, it's always been about business relationships.



That's true, though I won't follow this too closely. I have no desire to visit Facebook and the only Google services I use besides search, are the corporate-oriented ones, like Apps. And then really only Calendar and GMAIL for IMAP/POP on a few domains.

Thanks for the invite, Dan. I've invited my closest friends and family members, but I suspect very few of them will join and do anything on there.

I've spent about two minutes on there, so I'll need to give it much more of a try and see what I think. I wish I had a little more free time, but sadly I don't

Frankly, I don't see this lasting very long, but who knows, maybe it'll make some headway. The problem I see is that the social space is not like the smartphone OS space. With these social sites, it's always one at a time because there's essentially zero interoperability. There's only ever one service that's big at a time, and people only switch to a new one if everyone else they know uses it. I just think Facebook finally hit that point of mass adoption that has made it impossible to catch.

Basically I'm saying there's no second place in this race. LinkedIn is basically a different service, as you guys have discussed (and Tony, I agree with Bruno, I don't remember LinkedIn as anything buy business-focused, but I have a bad memory for some things).

Other quick notes about Google:

- I don't like the new black bar. It's very jarring with the light blue theme of everything else, including the Chrome browser its self.

- In general, it seems like the new Google theme is modeled after the GDGT redesign

- I'm sad that Google Health is being shuttered. I had high hopes for that, since somebody desperately needs to bring that field into the digital age and fast. Microsoft still has their product, right?