[0x12]

You can't simultaneously have an invite system and a huge marketing push. It's like pretending that you are classy and telling a lot of people that they are not part of the crowd you consider good enough to make it through the front door.

You have one chance to launch a service like this for a large audience. If you want to do an invite only private beta to get the kinks out then you would probably have to do that under a different name. Once you associate the google brand with it people expect it to work and expect it to work at scale.

Anything less is blowing your first impression. 90 days to wait to try a new service? People are simply not going to wait that long, they might have tried it in the first week but three months is a relatively long period to feel left out, that's a negative first impression. It takes a lot of work to undo a negative first impression.

As for google+ not going to be killed, they did it to wave and plenty of other products that did not attract enough users to be good enough for google, why would google+ be different, especially with a purposefully slowed down launch like this? That only increases the chance.

[finisterre]

> You can't simultaneously have an invite system > and a huge marketing push.

I don't think Google has done a huge marketing push, yet, considering how big a product this is for them.

They've done little press and haven't bought advertising online or in the real world - something they did for Chrome. They've so far done pretty much the minimum a company of such scale could do for a product this big. It was inevitable that a lot of people would want to join as soon as they heard of Google's plans.

I have a feeling that the marketing push is very much still to come.

[enjalot]

> I have a feeling that the marketing push is very much still to come.

sign out of google services and go to google.com If everyone gets that little arrow, that's a pretty big marketing push...

[thomaslangston]

Which happened on the same day they are dropping invite-only, correct?

[munificent]

> You can't simultaneously have an invite system and a huge marketing push.

What huge marketing push? All Google did was post a blog about it and send out some invites.

[nhebb]

I never signed up for +1, yet I saw +1 buttons next to all my search results. While not a TV or radio ad blitz, that is a form of marketing.

[nl]

+1 isn't the same as Google+

+1 is a social recommendation and bookmarking service integrated into 3rd party websites and Google's search. It is orthogonal to Google+ (although both Google+ and +1 use the same social graph).

[nhebb]

I guess I'm suffering from internet burnout, but I wasn't paying attention to the differentiation between Google+ and Google's +1. If they're not related then that's a really poor naming strategy.

[megablast]

I guess it is everybody else's fault but yours?

I think they are deliberately meant to be similar.

[nhebb]

Mea culpa, Obi Wan.

A couple of levels up I mistakenly thought that the +1 buttons next to my search results were an early buzz effort for Google+. I thought "recommend this page" implied "recommend this page to my friends on Google+". I made that mistake because of the name similarity and the timing of release. If a marketer introduces an ambiguity, I don't think it's the responsibility of the target to disambiguate the message.

[morsch]

Whether on purpose or not, it's all very confusing: Google+, +1, Buzz, I still don't know which of those is supposed to do what and which of them is here to stay for the long term.

I was desperately looking for a way to add posts to my Google+ stream (like a tumble blog) from Firefox and I kept getting ways to +1 stuff, which does end up in Google +1, but hidden away and, grotesquely, with no way to even promote it to a full post.

And then there's these odd news feed like topics you can subscribe to in Plus -- which I guess might work if you're interested in sports or whatever, but I just keep wishing I could use it as a link to the similar-but-different Reader. Incidentally, what happens if you star something in Reader, does it +1 it, Buzz it, or is that another way of socially promoting it?

[yesimahuman]

The truth hardly matters if users see it differently.

[nl]

Yes, that's true - and I think in this case Google benefits from that.

If web users associate the +1 buttons with Google+ then it is free advertising for Google+.

[rodh257]

Yes tech blogs went nuts over it, but I don't remember seeing any actual organized Google marketing push on it. If that were to happen, Google would likely be targeting people outside of the tech community.