[saurik]

What is so silly is that they already had existing experience of the "invitation only" feature destroying a launch: Wave; I had a ton of friends at the time who were really excited about Wave, but they could almost never use it because there was at least one person they might want to involve in the discussion who didn't yet have access. It just seems like such a beginner-level misunderstanding of the value of networked products: even video games, which are classically purchased per user, have been moving in a direction where "if you own this game and your friends don't they will still be able to play it with you". I wish I understood the reason Google keeps doing this: it isn't like I really imagine that Google (of all companies) absolutely needs these invitation buffers to help them scale the system out (maybe for Wave, but not for G+), to the point where they have existential risk that the whole project will fail. (Am I simply misremembering how the G+ invite process worked, due to the way Wave worked? Were you guarantee access if you could get invited by a friend?)