[silverbax88]

The first time they killed it (Buzz) by blowing privacy and automatically linking everyone in your email address book.

This time they blew privacy by demanding everyone use their "Real Names".

I'm not exactly sure why Google is so intent on getting this wrong, but wow, they sure are.

[redorb]

I agree with you on buzz's "Over sharing our address book"

I don't agree with the "Real Names" claim; their are reasons to want people to use their own name.

The only success google ever had with Invite only type thing was Gmail - I remember being so excited to get my invite and haven't moved since...

That may have worked because those were different time on the internet and perhaps the other alternatives sucked so hard (hotmail, Yahoo!)

I really don't understand the slow roll out at Google's scale - they should have released later but full-out and dedicated the resources in a "build it and they will come style" ~ even if they wasted the time because it failed it wouldn't be any worse than it is now... cause you didn't build it before hand they didn't come.

- Why would people leave facebook to feel snubbed by 'having to wait for a Google+ invite'? - it wasn't 3x-10x better than the alternatives like Gmail was.

[silverbax88]

I don't know if I could agree with that, at least in this case. I'm sure invite-only isn't a good policy unless you are really beta testing, millions of users jumped on the bandwagon despite their being invites only, and then millions of users started abandoning the platform almost as fast. A decline in use is not the same as nobody jumping on.

The numbers show that the rapid descent started almost immediately from the point that Google starting enforcing the Real Names policy.