Looks like they turned off invites again.

Darn. Do you think invites I've already sent will work?

Probably not.

I don't know how the official invite process works, but you can get people in just by adding them into a circle and sharing a post with them. It triggers an email and the red button gets you to a signup page that has let everybody in I've tried it with so far.

Yeah. Thats how I thought it worked but it seems to have been disabled again.

Thanks, Dan. I haven't had a chance to play with it much, but it does look pretty nice, if a bit rough around the edges.

My guess on the lack of Buzz integration is that they're going to silently kill Buzz off once Google+ is widely adopted -- not only because it contains most of Buzz's functionality, but also to avoid the negative mojo Buzz received when it launched.

The lack of Reader and Talk integration is more puzzling -- those seem like no-brainers.

Re: whether Google+ will succeed, I think it's important to remember that, as flawed as Myspace was, it still took Facebook a couple of years to become the top dog. Facebook has its own flaws, particularly in the area of data stewardship, so I think Google is wise to emphasize the ability to control what you share with whom. And, to riff off of the point that Dan's friend made about high school friends on Facebook versus college friends/colleagues on Twitter, perhaps Google+s weakness of not having anyone on it yet is actually a positive thing for some people who want to start fresh without defriending a bunch of people.

Folks who've already sucked their entire lives into Facebook probably aren't going to be leaving any time soon, but I think there are a lot of reluctant Facebook users out there who will give it a shot.

I really like that G+ has fixed many of the things I hated about Facebook. Example: arbitrarily long posts. I also like the Circles thing. Yes, Facebook also has a form of group ACLs, but G+ makes it a lot easier to add and remove groups when you're about to do something. I also like that you can follow somebody without them needing to follow you back (like Twitter, unlike Facebook). There are a lot of good ideas in G+.


The former. LinkedIn now has text status updates and you can comment on your friends' posts. Just like Facebook. That was definitely not there in the beginning, but Facebook borrowed/improved the idea from Twitter, and LinkedIn followed suit.

Circles are just the way I would have done it. I really like the ideas around which G+ has been designed, compared to FB.
I hope it takes off.

A couple coworkers and I did some edge case testing of the circles/sharing features this morning. In most scenraios, it worked in ways we expected it to work, but there seem to be some idiosyncrasies in how G+ handles posts that weren't immediately obvious.

One of the more surprising things we learned is that visibility settings in individuals' profiles seem to control how messages propagate through those individuals. We set our test up so that I was in a circle with coworker A, who was then in a circle with coworker B (but I was not in a circle with coworker B.) My expectation was that, if B then posted a message to his "extended network", I would see it in the "incoming" bucket in my activity stream, but that didn't happen. It turns out that in order for that propagation to happen, A had to change his profile so that B's existence in his circles was visible. This behavior kind of makes sense (especially if A doesn't want his association with B to be known) but it certainly does limit the extendedness of the "extended network."

Another thing we noted was that if you post something to someone in a circle and then remove them from the circle, they can still see it -- it doesn't go back and erase history, unless you delete the actual post. That's probably the way most people would expect it to work, but it could have gone the other way I guess.

We also stumbled across the "disable reshare" option in the sharing UI, and I kind of like that. Doesn't prevent someone from cut/pasting, but in a circle of people you trust, it could be useful.

Anyway, there are a lot of moving parts -- hopefully someone will (or has) put together an easy-to-understand cheat sheet so people know who sees what in all of the various combinations of post types, profile visibility settings, and circle memberships.

One thing that I dislike about G+, and virtually every other "stream" interface I've seen, is the newest-first chronological sorting. I understand that presenting posts oldest first on something like a blog is totally impractical, but with something like G+, I should be able to view unread posts (or posts with unread replies) and then see just those, ordered oldest to newest, so that I'm reading things in order. Then when I've read the posts (maybe I click on them to mark them as read or something) they disappear from the unread view.

Then there's the issue of posts popping back up to the top because someone replied to them -- that should be configurable, too.

Judging by the number of friends who are suddenly signing up, they've reenable the invites again...

The ones I'd sent out last night before they were closed off were still valid. Perhaps you're just seeing the people who had invites but hadn't signed up yet?

It's growing on me. I've been surprised that Google, of all companies, has a product that's more attractive than Facebook. They're not known for their design, but I'm kind of appreciating the look. They seem to be coordinating it with a redesign of their other apps too, though GMail still looks the same for now... *edit* and there we go */edit*

Yeah. Thats what I meant. The emails started working again as invites.

In unrelated news, Facebook seems to have changed slightly and now you get an even more annoying realtime feed box on the side! Nothing at all to do with Google+. Nope >.>

Dense. Hah.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Yeah. I actually felt motivated to send feedback about that.

Hit me with an invite. john at bjorgen dot net

Thanks!

Do you have a Gmail address? In the not-entirely-documented world of G+invitations, that seems to matter.

If anyone can send one to msaeger (at) gmail (dot) com

Thanks!

I started getting that view a couple weeks ago. Damn annoying- they pulled the 'poke box' and events link for that garbage.
For some reason it's back to normal for me since yesterday.

Weird. I guess its all part of the phased rollout of "features" on Facebook. I only started getting it today. Its also very recently that I had that "feature" for where it attempts to do bad facial recognition on photos and auto tag me. Thankfully you can disable it...

Yeah, that first invite failed. The address I listed forwards to my Gmail, but here's the real thing:

jbjorgen at gmail dot com

Whenever Google next turns invitations back on, I'll see what I can do.

I don't care what they think it means, either way I'm a little pissed off. The "Preview" theme balloons everything up to take up WAY more space that is possibly necessary. The "Preview (Dense)" theme squishes it back down a tiny bit more, but still takes up far more room than any current theme.

Why on earth do they think this is a good idea? I already go to great lengths to minimize any wasted space in GMail when I'm using my netbook. With these new themes, I won't be able to fit 7 lines on the screen. These themes are just a terrible way to present information. If they were providing more info and needed space to do that, I'd say fine, but all they're doing is pretty much doubling the vertical space that one email entry takes up in the inbox. Why?

The previews are handy, though. At least then extension writers can get a head start on fixing the stupid new design. I like the look, but I hate the layout.

Whenever you have spare invites, I would love to check it out. julfhelsingius at gmail dot com.

Sent one earlier, btw.

Hmm - haven't received any invites, only a circle sharing message from Andy, but that did not trigger an invite. I wonder if it is because I live in a non-english-speaking (according to Google) country, where they aren't piloting yet...

When you clicked through from the sharing message did that not take you to the login screen for Plus then ?

That was how I got "invited". But the whole experience seems to be very variable...

No, I got a "to register your interest, leave your email address" page.

Were you logged into Gmail before opening the page ? (no idea whether that makes any difference or not)

I got this the first time I went to it. I did leave my email.
About a day later I tried the link again and found I could register.
I can't remember the specifics of the process, though.