Not to cry wolf, but imo Google+ is close to deadpool. To understand that, you have to realize how high of a ceiling anything like G+ coming out of Google would have to meet. It's incredibly high: they were taking on facebook.

Unfortunately, from their behavior and celebratory posts about the success, they seemed to act as if the ceiling was a lot lower. I can understand if the team needs some internal celebrations but fueling it in the media imo does not help google plus. The media would go crazy either way. A more mature response from google would have been "this is nothing" - instead they prefer their PR hacks to to push a mostly useless stat like signup numbers.

Celebrating 10 million users? Give me a break. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how social works. Facebook has always been about usage. And sure, you can argue that they only talk about usage because people use facebook a lot. By the same logic, when google+ does not talk about usage(preferring to talk about the less relevant signup numbers), what does that tell about G+? Hmm.

Going gaga and fueling the tech media to give you more coverage? I'd argue any tech coverage of google plus hurts it more than helps it.

Meet Google+, the new twitter - unless they do something radically different.

I have to disagree. In the last month I have spent literally 10 times the amount of time on G+ than on Facebook because I have been enjoying it more than FB.

I also think the ugly little black bar across all Google apps is the secret sauce: while using other Google products, I see some G+ event and sometimes I drift over to G+ for a minute or two.

I realize that I am not a typical web user, but to me the high value on the web is Google products (including search for work related stuff), Netflix streaming, and Amazon. Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo News, ACM Portal and Hulu+ are not major draws but I still value them.

I disagree. Google's going to take inspiration from how they became to be as a reason to try taking lead.

I still don't get why people don't see that Google+ is like Facebook for companies, partners, consultants, clients, "and such". It's in fact invaluable in that sense. We use a Cicle for our startup which with Hangout basically replaces Skype. The thing is that we later plant to have a circle for devs, and a circle for managment, etc - and I'm sure this applies to any company size. How much would say IKEA cut their infrasturcture and communication costs if they had "a corporate twitter (between people, or machines, or both - like a collective intelligence), a support page for customers out, an interaction capabilities with new or existing teams/customers/subgroups" all in one system? Do the math. Google had enough credibility for a huge company as H&M to replace their old systems with Google Apps. It's not a Facebook killer, it's a business enhancer.

Wouldn't our evaluation depend a lot on your model of how invites would spread across the social graphs of users? I'd think that the user base would expand until the sub-marginal user had been invited. Given that the value of the network is largely determined by the user base, that user might be found fairly early in the invite process.

Given that G+ probably had a heavily concentrated set of initial invites, I think it's a safe bet that it's largely done growing for now. That's probably good for Google, though; I imagine it makes the feedback better for this stage of development while being fairly easy to handle.

Google+ is too late to win the social media throne. It's boring and only superficially different.

The only way Google+ can survive and not shrivel up like Wave is to stop trying to be Facebook 2.

Be different Google. Don't be boring.

This is as useless as watching stock prices go up and down every day. G+ is a long term project.

It also has another launch in it's future (when it drops the invite only limitation) and they have yet to introduce an API or a game section or a proper photo app, all of which will draw attention and traffic.