The fatal mistake was having it invite/beta-only at the beginning. Google has enough experience scaling now that they shouldn't have needed to do that. I suspect that they lost a vast number of people with that and thereby a lot of "test" nesting posts (which would have got everyone feeling that everyone else is there rather than it being a ghost town).
They probably found the social network analysis from the Gmail sign-ups (knowing who recommends to who) to be useful. However the difference between Gmail and Google+ is that Gmail is inter-operable with other networks via a standard protocol, with social networking that is not the case and they should have gone for as many sign-ups as possible.
All that said, they have a higher number of people per unit of time signing up than Facebook did when they started so it will take years for it all to shake out. Facebook also used exclusive/slow signups, but that was linked to university prestige/tribalism/rolling fad rather than just an apparently random process.
My bias is that this had a big impact. A few years ago I might of asked around for a beta invite for the Next Big Thing, but after the Google Wave debacle I'm much less interested in being a tech lemming for an uncertain social networking service. In short: internet burnout.
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The fatal mistake was having it invite/beta-only at the beginning. Google has enough experience scaling now that they shouldn't have needed to do that. I suspect that they lost a vast number of people with that and thereby a lot of "test" nesting posts (which would have got everyone feeling that everyone else is there rather than it being a ghost town).
They probably found the social network analysis from the Gmail sign-ups (knowing who recommends to who) to be useful. However the difference between Gmail and Google+ is that Gmail is inter-operable with other networks via a standard protocol, with social networking that is not the case and they should have gone for as many sign-ups as possible.
All that said, they have a higher number of people per unit of time signing up than Facebook did when they started so it will take years for it all to shake out. Facebook also used exclusive/slow signups, but that was linked to university prestige/tribalism/rolling fad rather than just an apparently random process.
My bias is that this had a big impact. A few years ago I might of asked around for a beta invite for the Next Big Thing, but after the Google Wave debacle I'm much less interested in being a tech lemming for an uncertain social networking service. In short: internet burnout.