RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006 From: London, England Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: VaguelyCurious (And up until right this second I thought that the whole 'invite only' thing was stupid, because it's a social network so I figured that obviously everyone was going to realise google's got a vested interest in the invites being as un-exclusive as possible, so there's not really any cachet involved in getting one. But obviously people are falling for it. So sorry, google. I apologise for doubting your marketing strategy, should you care. Which obviously you don't, because you're google.) It's not a marketing thing. It's an infrastructure thing. G+ is still technically a beta. So they have a product that still has some holes in it, and where they couldn't handle either the fault reports of, say, a billion people at once, plus their server infrastructure won't have been set up to support a billion (or more) people either, from day one, coz that'd be daft. So they release on an "open invite" model; they gear up what infrastructure they need to in order to support those numbers, and then de-bug in real time as that cohort increases in size, relatively quickly, but still in a manageable fashion. If they hit a major problem they'll just restrict new invites for a few days to give themselves the time and bandwidth to sort it. It's the same model they used with Gmail, and that was just about the smoothest ultra-large scale rollout anyone's ever seen. G+ will do the same, assuming people like it, and I think they probably will. Plus they now have a load of development resource from what used to be Google Labs (their skunkworks unit) at their disposal (since croaking G Labs back into the common dev pool), so if they decide to add new functionality as they go they've got the bods to do it. They're getting very good at this stuff, and given how terrible Facebook is, there's every chance they'll make a success of it.
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