Following a strong demand, the Google+ team is contemplating expansion. “In order to double the social network’s population Google briefly let Google+ users invite new members last night,” said a Cnet blog post on Thursday.
In addition, Google has begun working on its plans for letting business users, apart from individuals, use the service sometime later this year.
Due to ‘insane’ demand, Google had been limiting the individual sign-up rate, leading to frustration among many who wanted to get in. But all that seems to be a thing of the past. Dave Besbris , the Google+ engineering director declared on Wednesday that it was time for another growth spurt for Google+.
A look at the Google+ feature introduction page for new arrivals.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Besbris said in a Google+ post, “Things are going well with the systems right now so we feel comfortable enough to open up invites for a brief period.” He said that their goal was to double the user base in the field trial from its initial group.
On Besbris’ declaration, Stephen Shankland of Cnet comments, “ Apparently the moment was indeed fleeting, because I couldn’t find an invitation mechanism by the time I woke up here in England. That means Lutz Beyer’s amusing cartoon about Google+ exclusivity remains relevant.”
He continues, “Google had opened invitations briefly last week, shortly after the mostly-closed beta test began. I’ve had success getting quite a few people in by a somewhat circuitous Google+ invitation route that involves sharing a Google+ post by e-mail with their Gmail addresses.”
It’s been an irregular process: some people told me they never got an invitation, and sometimes the message took days to arrive. And because Google throttles the sign-up rate, many of those I’ve invited had to check back several times before they happened to click when the window was open.”
In a comment, Besbris apologized for the sporadic availability.
Google has made a couple of changes – one, shutting down the ability to publicly share an initially private post and, the other, involving profile pictures. “Changing your public profile picture or scrapbook photos will no longer generate a public post to the stream, just to the people you have in your circles. So only people in your circles will engage in discussions about the photos you post,” Google+ product manager Shimrit Ben-Yair said in a Google+ post.
Besbris wouldn’t say how many people are using Google+ right now, but it’s certainly in the thousands, at least. Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and president of FamilyLink.com, estimated that there were 1.7 million people on Google+ on Monday, a figure based on a statistical extrapolation from the frequency of surnames. “My model uses surname distribution data from the US Census Bureau, and compares it to how many Google+ users there currently are with a small sampling of surnames in the US and in the world,” he said of his method.
Google+ is a sprawling product, too, and it’s taken time for people to grasp its many mechanisms for organising contacts, sharing posts publicly or selectively and figuring out details such as, say, the difference between the default stream of contacts’ posts (which shows posts from people in all your circles) and the “incoming” stream (which shows posts from people who put you in one of their circles). It can be used either through a sophisticated web app or a full-featured Android app; an IOS app for Google+ app has already been submitted for approval.
It’s not clear when exactly Google will open up the invitations again, though clearly it will. When it does, Besbris advises you proceed cautiously, too.
“We continue to throttle invites, so please don’t mass invite folks, as it won’t work,” he said. “If you invite a handful of your most important friends and family you’re much more likely to get these folks into our system.”
Google is also wrestling with business demand for Google+, omething to match Facebook pages that need not be tied to a single individual.
Business accounts will be coming later this year, Google product manager Christian Oestlian said yesterday in a Google+ post. He also noted that Google will shut down existing non-individual accounts, or atleast most of them.
“Right now, we’re very much focused on optimising for the consumer experience, but we have a great team of engineers building a similarly optimized business experience for Google+. We’re very excited about it, and we hope to roll it out later on this year,” Oestlian said in a video about the option.
Several corporations have already jumped onto Google+, but it’s not “optimally suited” for them, Oestlian said, and Google is shutting them down even as it plans to test what it hopes to actually launch. He said, “Over the next few months, we are going to be running a small experiment with a few marketing partners to see the effect of including brands in the Google+ experience. We’ll begin this pilot with a small number of named partners.”
Given that companies had already jumped aboard, it appears that at least some businesses would prefer a suboptimal experience than none at all. A measured debut is a sensible way of heading off problems before they’re big, but Google also would do well to tap into the Google+ enthusiasm while it’s still strong.