Google+ gets a little 'buzz,' and a lot easier to join

Google+ Plus Google+ has been getting a fair amount of, well, buzz, in the geek press. Forgive the pun as I refer to one of Google's social media mistakes from the past, but new social media effort is getting far better reviews, especially compared to the angry backlash Google faced when it launched Buzz.

In addition to some early positive reviews, Google+ garned press attention this week because the initial launch was restriced to a few people lucky enough to score early invites, including most of the top tech bloggers and journalists.

We'll see if Google gets social media right this time, but the innovative features of Google+ combined with the growing list of intregrated services included in the world of Google Apps, shows Google is making some serious moves in the world of online collaboration, as well as social connection.

Here are a few tips and articles I've been collecting that will help you appreciate why you might want to score an invite -- something that seems to have gotten much easier to get as of today...

Articles about Google+

My favorite feature in Google+ (and I'm not alone) is the Circles feature, which makes it more intuitive, and more fun, to organizer your 'friends' into one or multiple categories. This is SOOOO much better than Facebook's List feature, which most users don't even seem aware of...

One of my first critiques of the service is that many of my friends use more than one email address and Google is making it hard to distinguish between them. You can easily add people from your Google contacts list, but then it's easy to end up multiple icons for one person, which can be confusing at best, and may make it hard to connect with people.

Google seems to already have at least an inkling about this problem, at least based on my recent experience going throught the Google Apps update process for multiple accounts. Anyone who has more than Google account, or uses their own domain name with gmail, has probably already discovered that Google is changing the way you can use IDs for different logins. Exactly how this fits in with Google+ is not quite clear, but I suspect you'll see more changes to how Google+ manages multiple email addresses in the future.

Why did Google make it hard to join Google+?

Email Marketing

As Sean Bonner explains so well in this blog post, Google limited the number of people who could join in the first days after launching the new service. As he explaines, Google used the "limited invite list" to manage growth and development, as well as build buzz.

Bonner wrote thise post after he got tired of explaining to people why he couldn't invite them to join. The way it works, there is no limit to the number of people you can invite once you're in, but Google has been turning the invite feature on and off since they launched, which means there is no gaurantee that the invite feature will be work at any given time.

How to get a Google+ invite

As I write this on 7/12/2011, the main Google+ page now says you can sign up yourself, and when when I log into my own account and click on the home link, I can send out invites. If you want in, send me a message with your email address to janine@digitalfamily.com, and if the site is still open, I'll be happy to send you a Google+ invite.

The Best and Worst of Google+

These two articles will help you appreciate the best new features, and the places where the service is disappointing the early reviewers.

How to use Google+

If you just want to see how Google+ works, or you've signed up and you're not sure how to use it yet, here are the official help docs and demos for Google+

Interactive demo: http://www.google.com/+/demo/

Learn more: http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/

Google+ for mobile: http://www.google.com/mobile/+/