I have some invites. PM me email addresses. I'll take the first five so I don't sit here all day handing them out...
I, too possess the power to invite. PM me if you wish to be judged if you are worthy of joining Google+ (hint: you're not).
I've got a couple invites too. If anyone still needs one, PM me an email address and I'll send it out when I get home from work.
I don't think this will necessarily be a Facebook killer, more like a Facebook motivator. I would bet that in the next several months, Facebook will integrate a Circles-esqe option and anything else that people really start to like from Google+. In the end, hopefully this will force both companies to make a better product instead of resting on their laurels.
I'm actually tentatively looking forward to this. My internship at the moment has me dealing with social media opportunities, so I'll be checking out my account to see if there are any cool features. And hopefully this can shed some of the idiots of Facebook, as well as the problems with oversharing, privacy and so forth. Not expecting nirvana here, but Circles sounds good, to name a feature.
I'll second what my boy said when he got a pop up from google asking if he wanted to set his space and join. He laughed, shook his head, said, "fuck you" and closed out of the whole thing. Perfect reaction.
The big difference that i can see between Buzz and Google+ is that Google+ wont be an epic failure. Google+ is like someone read everyone’s complaints about Facebook and fixed them. I think the limited release is smart for two reasons. First, from a technical aspect, it's good to have it gently populated so you can work out bugs as it grows. Second, from a marketing stance, people are asking for invites who don’t even know what the hell it does, it could be an Al Qaeda dating site for all they know, but they want it. I think once everyone gets on board it will do well, lets just hope it doesn't fall to all the same BS as Facebook and Myspace. Ironically Mark Zuckerberg had the largest circle on Google+ so far.
another +1 for Google+. This new chat system on Facebook is fucking stupid. I already know who I talk to regularly, what about the people I have forgot about and might be able to reconnect with who I haven't spoken to in a long time. Isn't that one of the points of social networking?
Facebook in general is a bloated piece of website that is probably going to implode on itself soon (not soon enough). If Google keeps the Farmville and pages and everything like it, they'll probably get the market share after some time.
Facebook showed social networking what Google showed search engines. People have no fucking taste and shouldn't be allowed to influence the design of websites that others will access. Professional UI designers get paid for a reason. Google+ has a real chance to show us that again. Clean, elegant design and specifically focused content that delivers exactly what the users want and nothing else, and leaves the users with enough control that they can whore for attention, or participate in privacy as they see fit, will succeed in drawing traffic. Webpages cluttered with shit, like myspace or yahoo will fall by the wayside. Facebook might not be as cluttered with shit as myspace, but it takes a lot of time and effort to declutter your collection of shit and block all the fucking stupid games your friends play. I think facebook's problem is they've tried to monetize through something other than simple advertising. They try to monetize through micropayment bullshit which means they have to pimp games and crap that drives users away. If Google+ can stick to the usual google product revenue through advertising - they can avoid that kind of asshole behaviour and deliver a superior product. Google+ is also a chance to give people the tools to segregate their private persona and their professional identity. Facebook has always driven the one person, one profile, everyone knows your real name if you interact with anything they interact with. If the intarwebs has taught us anything since it's popularization - it's that people don't fucking want that. People want an outlet for the personality that they don't show their employer - because as a group, we're mostly more interesting, and less politically correct than our jobs.
The Google+ app for iPhone just got released. <a class="postlink" href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google/id447119634?mt=8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google/id447119634?mt=8</a> It's not showing up (for most) in iTunes yet, but you can access it from that link.
I have only men in my circles. Success! I can't wait 'til my husband sees this. Seriously though - now, after having tried it for a few days, I don't think Google+ is as shit hot as everyone is making it out to be.
That's interesting but I don't think that's necessarily all that revealing. When Facebook first came out, it was restricted to a handful of college campuses and slowly expanded itself to other colleges and, later, high schools before it reached 10m. Even with the invite-only launch, Google+ immediately opened itself to registration from anyone that could get their hands on an invitation. Also, Google+ has the advantage of a built-in audience of people that already use Gmail and their search engine. Twitter and Facebook both had start from scratch and grow themselves organically to reach those numbers.
While the mechanics of how they got to the numbers is interesting, and somewhat relevant, it's still impressive as hell that Google did this in 16 days and are still growing. Ever since Facebook hit it big, there have been a ton of other attempts at creating competition, and none have appeared to have a shot. Even Google's previous attempts, like Orkut. Google+ does have a huge shot, and it has seemed to resolve a large number of problems/issues that FB has. Google+ seems to be the "grown-up's Facebook", I think.