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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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and from what i remember, staying true to typical google fashion, they fucked it up by not opening up the "beta" when they had a critical mass forming behind it. then only to force everyone into having a profile a year or whatever later. lol, too late. i think most of us understood that anything associated with google is assumed to be a never-ending "beta", so no idea what they were thinking or waiting for.
I think it was definitely the super long beta period where you needed an invite killed it. I knew a ton of people who were interested that gave up
That's easy to say now, but Orkut (another Google social network, mostly used in Brazil) also had a beta invite system... And that helped it grow tremendously. The secrecy and "status" of getting invited made people go wild - they would even sell invites.
The strategy can work. It's just very timing sensitive.
Orkut was young when Facebook access was still restricted to college kids only. Google+ was dumb. You’d get and then it was just tumble weeds.
I'm not sure if I'm mis-remembering, but I believe my first Gmail account was by invitation. It was pretty much just an email account back then
Correct, I got my account invite from The Screensavers show with Kevin Rose. They were giving them out randomly to viewers.
Reminds me of Bluesky which is also in a permanent beta.