Who Wants A Google+ Invite?

Posted: 25 Aug 2011 05:30 AM PDT

A few weeks ago I wrangled an invite to Google+ and now have some invites of my own to share. I thought I’d also offer a few thoughts for those of you who haven’t had a chance to get inside yet.

If you’d like an invite

Leave a comment below
when filling out the comment use the email you want the invite to be sent to
Your email doesn’t need to be a Gmail address
You will need to have or set up a Google account for the email address

I’ll send out invites to the first 50 people who ask for one, assuming there are 50 of you out there that want one.

Here’s my profile for those of you with an account who’d like to connect.

Thoughts on Google+

I’ll spare you talk about what Google+ is or how it’s similar and different to other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There’s plenty of information out there already that’s easy to find.

Instead I’ll offer some observations from my own use of Google+ these last few weeks.

I find myself checking in to Google+ more than I am other social networks
I find it easier to navigate and set up than Facebook
I like how circles makes it easy for me to send posts to different groups of people though Facebook is now adding similar controls
I like being able to follow people without them having to follow me back
Despite it’s quick growth there are far less people posting than joining

I’m following a little more than 100 people and about 40 people are following me. My network isn’t particularly large which could account for why I don’t see many people posting. Of the 100 I follow only 20 or so seem to post regularly.

On the bright side the number of people posting seems to be increasing and less people currently active means more opportunity to have a conversation and get to know others.

When I’ve sought out people to add to circles they tend to fall into one of several camps.

Internet celebrities
Internet marketers
Designers and developers
The generally tech and web savvy

Perhaps that’s more to do with my own interests than who’s really there, but understand that for now your mom isn’t there. Neither is mine.

While Google+ is growing it’s not mainstream yet. That may or may not be an issue depending on who you want to connect with.

I also find myself drawn more to the design of Google+ which makes better use of space and color than Facebook. That helps contribute to the easier navigation for me.

Why Google+

If you’re already on Facebook or Twitter you may be wondering why you should sign up for Google+

I’ll leave it to you to decide if Google+ makes sense for your personal life. It’ll probably depend on whether or not your friends are there or can be convinced to join you.

On the business side Google+ is still small so there’s opportunity to build up an influential account before the masses arrive, assuming the masses do arrive at some point. My guess is Google finally got social networking right enough that the masses will arrive in time.

Google has said a few times they look to social signals as a way to determine rankings. SEOmoz posted a few months back about how they were seeing a strong correlation between ranking and social signals. Correlation is not causation, but given how Google has said they do look at social signals it seems likely that what happens on social networks influences where web pages rank.

It also makes sense that Google will use data from their own network over data they might get from another network as they’ll have more and cleaner data from their own network.

Even without changes in ranking Google+ might already be influencing click through as results now show when your Google+ friends have +1d one of the results. You might even see the recommended content ranking better for you.

Google+ still hasn’t introduced business pages but they should be coming and again being an early adopter will probably put you in a better position once the mainstream arrives.

Who Wants an Invite?

Again I have invites to give out if you want in.. Just leave a comment below and use the email address you want me to send the invite to. It doesn’t need to be a Gmail account, but you will need to either have or create a Google account with a public profile in order to use Google+ with your preferred email address.

I’m guessing we won’t reach that 50 invite limit, but if there’s a large demand I’ll offer more in the near future. I want to hold some in reserve and also don’t want to overwhelm myself having to send them out so quickly.

Naturally if I do invite you I’d be happy to have you add me to a circle. Like I said there’s not a ton of conversation going on at the moment so we can easily connect.

cool links

Thursday, 25 August 2011