Google Plus

[Lucas]

Well, I've sneaked in about 20 minutes ago but I already wish I could invite a lot of my current FB friends. VERY slick (still have to investigate all the various features, of course). I definitely see this going full viral in a flash (if it sticks and become successful it's a whole other matter).

[MuffinMan]

Main benefit so far is that, unlike facebook, the Google+ app actually pushes notifications to my phone.

[Teleku]

Guess I'll whore for an invite as well!

[caladein]

On a related note, I really like the Plus-style theme they added to Gmail today.

[Morfiend]

I really like it so far. Like a lot. My only problem is the contacts and recommendations. I have tons of people twice, or partial. For someone who is super anal about that stuff its driving me crazy.

I also managed to somehow removed all the members of one circle. I am pretty sure there is a way to unhide them, but I cant find it.

[Morfiend]

On a related note, I really like the Plus-style theme they added to Gmail today.

Me too. Finally gmail doesnt feel like 2006.

[Lucas]

New Gmail layout is very modern looking and less bulky.

Oh, by the way, folks, I think Google Plus is open for business now, or at least in Open Beta:

https://plus.google.com/up/start/?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fplus.google.com%2F&type=st&gpcaz=afe96be6&hl=en

Have fun!

[KallDrexx]

erm... are we looking at the same theme, because I chose Preview Dense, and I think it looks terrible.  There are no borders between sections anymore (the blue box is gone) and everything is an offshoot of white (and thus blends in together).

*edit* Also I don't understand how privacy works on this.  I get that when I make a post I can restrict what circles can see it, but what about non-posts?  For example, I set my profile picture, yet what if I don't want my profile picture to be public?  Not only was the picture automatically made public, but the post saying that I updated my profile picture is public.  I can't see how to restrict my albums so they aren't public. 

This seems to have even less privacy controls than Facebook...

[Quinton]

For your profile, click Edit Profile on the profile screen, click on pretty much any item on your profile, and you can set access to yourself, public, circles, some combination of circles and people, etc.  Control is very fine-grained throughout.

Your name, picture, and (this is rather strange and I believe going to change) gender are always public.  Everything else in the profile can be set to pretty much any level of access you like.

For albums, go to your profile, select the Photos tab, click on an album, and click on the editable "Visible to" thing under the album title.  Select who you want the album to be visible to.

[Salamok]

Anyone here I can send a PM to for an invite?

[MuffinMan]

Damn, Google+ is not compatible with IE6. Guess I'll have to find something productive to do at work.

[Morfiend]

Looks like google closed the invite loophole. Ill post here if I get any more invites. For now, there is nothing I can do for anyone else. Sorry.

[MuffinMan]

I'm sure they knew about the loophole from the very beginning and were monitoring it to see how many people were using it. Viral invite trick but when it hit critical mass they closed it.

People have been selling invites on ebay.  

[sigil]

I'm sure they knew about the loophole from the very beginning and were monitoring it to see how many people were using it. Viral invite trick but when it hit critical mass they closed it.

People have been selling invites on ebay.  

I'm looking in a few other places, but I'll humbly ask for an invite as well. :)

[Numtini]

So the "share a post with people who aren't on" no longer works?

[Quinton]

So the "share a post with people who aren't on" no longer works?

As best I understand it (the team has been a little cryptic) is that there is a rate limit for invitations being accepted most of the time.  You can periodically try clicking on the "learn more" link on one of those post notification emails and depending on the load you may find yourself at the signup UI flow.

The field trial is only a couple days old and I expect that they'll be increasing the rate of invites and new accounts as they swat down issues reported -- they've been pretty crazy busy and I wouldn't be surprised if some number of them are working through the holiday weekend...

[Goumindong]

If people are tossing invites i would love to throw my name into the hat

[Numtini]

From talking with friends, they're just plain not getting the shared items in email. That may be how they're throttling it.

[KallDrexx]

Yesterday I was able to invite 4 people with the "share a post" method, and I did them each individually.  Don't know if I got lucky or what.

[JWIV]

Don't know if we want to set up a F13 circle or not, but  if so  I'll go ahead and throw out my plus profile

Plus Profile

[Lucas]

Don't know if we want to set up a F13 circle or not, but  if so  I'll go ahead and throw out my plus profile

Plus Profile

Would be cool to have a F13 circle, why not?

[Hawkbit]

If anyone has loose invites, please send one my way.  Thanks a ton!

[MuffinMan]

If anyone has loose invites, please send one my way.  Thanks a ton!

Sent one to your gmail, no guarantees that it will work though.

[Hawkbit]

No problem at all, thanks very much for trying!

[MuffinMan]

Don't know if we want to set up a F13 circle or not, but  if so  I'll go ahead and throw out my plus profile

Plus Profile

Well, each person can setup their own circle but there's no universal group-type on +. You'll just see random people adding you and since you can't see the name of their circle you were put in you won't be able to tell they're from F13. For example, I know who you are from your link, added you to my F13 circle but I bet you don't know who I am.

[Hawkbit]

Never got the email, they must be blocking.  No worries at all and thanks again for trying. 

As I'm looking over JWIV's profile (because it's the only one I've seen so far, sorry mate!), I find it interesting how much data is allowed out there.  I'm hoping you made all that available and there's options to tone that back if necessary. 

It's also interesting that I can see a pool of all people you have in your circles and who has you in circles, yet I can't see how those circles are arranged.  For myself, that still seems like entirely too much data that is public. 

[MuffinMan]

Just like facebook I believe it defaults everything to be viewable by anyone. The first thing that I did was change everything I could to my circles only so it's just as locked down as my facebook.

That's odd that you never even got the e-mail. I thought at the very least you'd get it but it would deny you the sign-up options.

[Quinton]

The names of circles and the exact contents of them are never revealed to others.

Posts do show who can see them if they're more limited than "Public" or "Extended Circles" -- but this is done as a list of people only (click the "Limited" tag between the poster's name and the date).

You can control the visibility of everything in your profile (including the box of people-in-circles at the left) by editing your profile, clicking on the item in question and customizing the visibility.

Handy public post on profile permissions:
https://plus.google.com/113805478630918777008/posts/AXu1jn8HbeN

[JWIV]

Never got the email, they must be blocking.  No worries at all and thanks again for trying.  

As I'm looking over JWIV's profile (because it's the only one I've seen so far, sorry mate!), I find it interesting how much data is allowed out there.  I'm hoping you made all that available and there's options to tone that back if necessary.  

It's also interesting that I can see a pool of all people you have in your circles and who has you in circles, yet I can't see how those circles are arranged.  For myself, that still seems like entirely too much data that is public.  

Yah, everything was locked down to circles, so the 'public' info is pretty limited.  Within circles, it's pretty easy to tweak things (though maybe the ability to set a default custom group would be nice).

While I was going through and tweaking my circle perms - I came across this  which is also really a nice verification tool:

Under Account Settings-> Profile and Privacy

In the first section, there's the following line:

See how your profile appears to other users


Just add in the username of people you have designated in different circles, and you're able to view your profile as that user - great way to check your permissions.

[naum]

Damn, Google+ is not compatible with IE6. Guess I'll have to find something productive to do at work.

Still using IE6?

Really? Seriously?

What company is it, so I can steer my money away from the brain-dead security minded…?

[Hawkbit]

That's pretty awesome, thanks for the clarification.

I'm not tin-foil hat like, but I'd at least like the option to be.  I hope they continue down this trend allowing for more privacy than FB.

Early to call, but I've seen a few tech opinion articles calling this the death of FB.  Sounds like FB is also scrambling to add circles somehow to their interface.  

[MuffinMan]

Damn, Google+ is not compatible with IE6. Guess I'll have to find something productive to do at work.

Still using IE6?

Really? Seriously?

What company is it, so I can steer my money away from the brain-dead security minded…?

Auto insurance company, a big one, so no sensitive data at all. Most of our applications run through IE so they're having a hell of a time migrating. They keep attempting to roll out IE8 for non-work applications but they've failed three times now. My IE8 auto-crashes at launch.

[Quinton]

I think predicting *anything* before the product even launches (this is a field trial / limited beta phase) including the death of anything is premature.  Until it goes full launch and we see how people end up using it and where things go from there, it's guesswork at best.

Dan Morrill sums it up pretty well here (https://plus.google.com/112413860260589530492/posts/8yD1PVU45sD):

I've been trying not to do a lot of meta posts about Google+, because if there is one thing I learned from the Android launch it is this: nothing anyone says right now matters.

The press coverage when we launched Android was all over the map, good and bad. (My favorite is still Ballmer's "Android is just words on paper", said ~5 days before we released the first SDK.) Not a lot of it was accurate, and it's pretty safe to say that nobody really predicted where we'd end up. Certainly I don't recall anyone predicting 500,000 new device activations a day, within around two and a half years.

So I am completely ignoring anything anyone says about Google+, because I know that the only thing that actually matters -- and indeed if you think about it, the only thing that actually can matter -- is the dedication and execution of the team. And right now, it's damned hard to argue with their hustle.

I can't even imagine where this thing will be in 2.5 years.

[Merusk]

Damn, Google+ is not compatible with IE6. Guess I'll have to find something productive to do at work.

Still using IE6?

Really? Seriously?

What company is it, so I can steer my money away from the brain-dead security minded…?

If that's your criterion, you're going to be very limited in your investing once you start researching what companies are still on IE6.

For example, Intel was still using it as of last year. Google tells me lots of financial institutions are as well.  SO, yeah, we wonder why there's been tons of hacks.

[Hawkbit]

Finally got your invite, but it is full.  They got hammered.  I talked with a few developer friends that are pissed (not seriously) they didn't get into this batch.  They made me promise to get them in when possible, lol. 

Thanks again.!