I wonder if they're limiting invite rates for technical reasons, or if it's just a marketing ploy - to make Google+ more desirable because of exclusivity. (Wasn't that the original catch for Facebook?)
I don't know what their reasons are and the invite rate here seems to be quick enough that it won't cause an issue, but IMO part of what killed Wave was Google's use of their standard user rate limiting on the product. I got access to it relatively early and it seemed really cool but by the time anyone else I knew could actually get into the service it was already pretty much dead.
Doling out exclusive invites can be useful for all sorts of reasons (including marketing/psychological), but you really need to be careful that it isn't so restricted that it causes your product (assuming it is at all 'social') to be stillborn.
I suspect a lot of it is technical. Not only are they probably working on ironing out issues of scaling bugs, but you have to consider that even if it takes off the amount of usage overnight would be so much higher than regular usage if they opened their doors today. How many people do you expect to use their video chat feature on a day to day basis, and how many people do you expect to use the video chat feature the first day that they sign up?
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I wonder if they're limiting invite rates for technical reasons, or if it's just a marketing ploy - to make Google+ more desirable because of exclusivity. (Wasn't that the original catch for Facebook?)
I don't know what their reasons are and the invite rate here seems to be quick enough that it won't cause an issue, but IMO part of what killed Wave was Google's use of their standard user rate limiting on the product. I got access to it relatively early and it seemed really cool but by the time anyone else I knew could actually get into the service it was already pretty much dead.
Doling out exclusive invites can be useful for all sorts of reasons (including marketing/psychological), but you really need to be careful that it isn't so restricted that it causes your product (assuming it is at all 'social') to be stillborn.
I suspect a lot of it is technical. Not only are they probably working on ironing out issues of scaling bugs, but you have to consider that even if it takes off the amount of usage overnight would be so much higher than regular usage if they opened their doors today. How many people do you expect to use their video chat feature on a day to day basis, and how many people do you expect to use the video chat feature the first day that they sign up?