Hmmmm.

As someone who dumped Facebook, I'm intrigued. I dislike the new black/dark grey toolbar that's appeared on my iGoogle homepage though.

If any of you get any invites...?

Love and kisses,

Mantrain xx

Oh wow, the black toolbar was intentional? I thought it was my fault. Like a graphical problem or messed up settings.

I think it's to draw people's attention to it, maybe temporarily. It's hideous.

funny I hadn't noticed it in gmail cos I'm using the spacey theme

but yeah, what I've read does sound like an improvement on facebook. It's just a waiting game with these things though, they'll only work if there's a minimum amount of buy-in and I'm not eager enough to be one of the pioneers

I think the toolbar's pretty useful. Don't mind that it's black.

In regards to Google+, no invites, sorry, but I think they're full ATM anyway. My sentiments about FB are much the same. I think that it will soon deteriorate into a gaming platform, sort of a social-media Newgrounds.com. Those wanting to use a social network for, hot damn, networking would be happy for a breath of fresh air. That's my $0.02, anyway.

I too am looking for invites. I know someone already in the program, so hopefully he'll get some invites soon. If I get in, I'll be sure to start distributing to Massassians.

That said, from what I've been reading, although they are opening this gradually, they do plan on opening it up quickly. As in a matter of weeks. I hope that's true! I'm really interested in it. The Circles system is the perfect response to my biggest complaints with social networking crap.

I'll give it a shot. Also I love the URL: [url]www.google.com/+[/url]

Very interesting in trying this out.

Meh, facebook does everything I need and there's no real motivation for me to leave it. Don't need another social networking dick-waving contest like what happened back when myspace thought it was going to be successful. I see this going the way of Google Wave (what a joke that was).

I'm hoping it goes the way of gmail instead =p

XKCD put it perfectly:

A. MySpace came before Facebook and at that time, it WAS successful.
B. Google can't afford to let this go the way of Google Wave (not that it was intended to be a social networking thing anyway). They are investing HUGELY on this.
C. Does circles really not excite you at all? It's easily the #1 reason to switch from Facebook. I almost never share **** on Facebook, because I don't want EVERYONE to see it. Why share some tech story when some of my friends couldn't care less? Why send a message to everyone about how life sucks and is depressing when only your closest friends will actually respond meaningfully? It's stuff like that which Facebook simply does not have a response for.

In short, this isn't Yet Another Social Network, it's Google's big play to kill Facebook. If you read Ars's article on it, you'd know how seriously they're taking this. Google is scared of Facebook, and that's never really happened to Google before. Google is out for blood on this one, and no matter who wins, I think it will be very easy to say, looking back, that it definitely did not go the way of Google Wave.

Ars Technica's article that CM referred to: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/06/inside-google-how-the-search-giant-plans-to-go-social.ars

Which they nabbed from Wired as it happens.

I really hope they have a great music integration system like MySpace did. When MySpace was popular it did WONDERS for my band. Facebook is just awful for music.

Time to scour all my gmails and see if I have an invite.

Nope, I got nothing.

I took the tour. Seems like nothing really special. Though typing into the huddle demo made me laugh for some reason.

I don't think that's really the intention. Other than perhaps events, it doesn't seem geared towards anything commercial (unlike, say, Facebook with companies having their own pages and such).

Hahahaha myspace and great music integration hahahahahha

Oh, good grief. I don't want competition between two big networking sites, cuz then you will have some friends on one site, and some on the other. Way too messy.

Don't worry, Facebook is dead now.

lol

Wow... For the first time ever, Cool Matty took the words right out of my mouth in a thread about some sort of new techno business.

Well I want in on this ****.

You can bet that will change very fast. Google loves to advertise, it IS commercial.

you mean like how google also killed foursquare? owait

and twitter

Facebook is killing foursquare. And since Google is killing Facebook, YES!



I'm not saying they won't advertise. They definitely will. It's just not going to be a business spamfest like Facebook is.



Google doesn't need to kill Twitter. Twitter's doing a bang-up job of killing itself. If they restrict access any more, I might have to send smoke signals to tweet.

It'd be nice if the link to google plus actually told me what it was.


Restrict access?

What, the "Take a Tour" page didn't give you nearly enough info? Nor the five YouTube videos they posted?



Twitter's been kicking third-party client devs all over the place. They switch up login mechanisms multiple times, force restrictions on certain ones at random, limit what can be done, and have even straight up said "stop making third-party clients".

For some reason the interactive tour didn't load when I visited the link before.

Once you get in you can invite as many people as you want, so start posting e-mail addresses if you'd like to get in.

Oooooh circles.... pbththbththbthbhththb. No one cares. Google plus will falter for a long time and then fizz out when people start realizing more of their friends are still using facebook / posting updates only on facebook. The only early adopters will be nerditrons who pounce on every new webtrend like the e-version of hipsters and Google-fanboys, both of whom probably have non-existent social lives anyways. That is, it will never achieve that "critical mass" that would entice people to actually ditch facebook. Anyway, there are already privacy settings for individual posts - it's not that hard to implement custom friend lists on facebook as an answer to "circles".

I'm glad you're so adept at predicting the future, ragna. If we had more people like you, no one would ever chance enterprising anything due to the possibility that it might not take off.

No, no you can't. A select few have large amounts of invites. The rest have ~50. Anyone who gets invited during this round has 0.



You mean like when MySpace was big and no one used Facebook? Oh wait, no, they switched then and they'll switch now.

Have you ever tried to use friend lists? Even finding the location of it is a goddamn nightmare. And then they hide sharing capability behind the customize area without even telling you you can USE lists. And even then you can't send regular messages, only share random crap. It's absolutely horrible. Finally, the privacy settings are pathetic to boot, as it always assumes from the get-go that you want to share with everyone or whatever you defaulted. Facebook is a mess.

Frankly, I think there are only two reasons people use Facebook:

1. No alternative.
2. Games.

Since there's no reason they can't still play said games, 2 is not a problem. And 1 is solved, now.

I am saying this having found a way into Google+. I will pass out Massassian invites soon. I will make a separate thread for it.

And I was just about to ask if anybody had an invite.....

you're such a nerditron coolmatty geez

****in nerditrons, all of youse

damn though. After saying I didn't care enough to try it out, now that I know there'll be invites soon....

I got an invite today and tried it out. Pretty neat. There's a polish and even "fanciness" to it that is quite atypical of Google and makes it obvious they're betting hard with this.

When I got the invite I could invite as many people as I wanted, but now apparently new invites are turned off for the time being so ... >_>

H8 Pommy.