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Google+ Project: It’s Social, It’s Bold, It’s Fun, And It Looks Good — Now For The Hard Part. Last night, you may have heard talk of a mysterious black bar appearing on the top of Google.com. Or you may have even seen it yourself. No, you weren’t hallucinating. It was a sign of something about to show itself. Something big. Google+. What is Google+? Sort of. You see, the truth is that Google really is trying not to make a huge deal out of Google+. How’s that for downplaying it? “We believe online sharing is broken. What he proceeds to show me is a product that in many ways is so well designed that it doesn’t really even look like a Google product.

The first thing Gundotra shows me about Google+, and the first thing you’re likely to interact with, is something called “Circles”. It’s through Circles that users select and organize contacts into groups for optimal sharing. Gundotra realizes that many social services have tried and failed to get users to create groups. Next, Gundotra showed off a feature called “Sparks”. “Our goal here is to connect people.

More: Google+: First Impressions. Using Google+? Add Mashable to your circles. You'll get the latest about new Google+ features and tips and tricks for using the platform as well as top social media and technology news. Google has just unveiled Google+, its ambitious answer to Facebook. It turns all of Google into one giant social network, thanks to a core group of social products and a new navigation bar that integrates sharing into every single Google product. I spent much of Monday testing Google+'s features. SEE ALSO: PHOTOS | VIDEOS | POLL: What do you think of Google+?

Design: Aesthetically, it's all Google — minimalist with plenty of white space. SEE ALSO: What Do You Think of Google+? Conclusion: Google+ is a bold and dramatic attempt at social. Overall, Google+ is solid. If Google can persuade users to come back every day, it has a winner. First Night With Google Plus: This is Very Cool. I thought I'd type up some notes after an evening of using Google's new social network, Google Plus. This is a really big deal, a super ambitious effort involving scores of engineers over months of near total secrecy.

(Though some helpful sources and I scooped the core Circles part of all this three months ago.) The service is really, really well done. Will it be good enough? I have no idea, but I have felt drawn to keep using it all night long. The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it's the opposite of Facebook and Twitter's universal broadcast paradigm.

Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else. Above: Anil Dash on Plus. Google Circles to Challenge Facebook Connect When asked about a Google Plus API, Google's Joseph Smarr said the following tonight on the site itself. Above: XKCD tells it like it is. The end result? Google opens up, then closes Google+ invites due to “insane demand” If you were desperate to get a Google+ invite, there’s a very good chance you could have landed one tonight as Google gave existing Plus users the ability to invite anyone to test out the service. But the revelry didn’t last too long — Google ended up turning off invites due to the sudden rush of new users. “We’ve shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand,” Google’s head of social Vic Gundotra announced on the service.

“We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way.” Google+ launched on Tuesday to a small cadre of users, so tonight’s invite rollout is the first time the service has had a chance to spread to normal folks. People seem to be engaging with the service, judging from the number of folks on my Twitter feed who have been wrestling with Google+ all night. Even tech-savvy users will likely be confused when they first join Google+, so it’s no surprise that some mainstream users are having trouble. Google Now Lets Those In Google+ Offically Invite Others. Already in Google+ and want to let others in? Google’s now allowing this. Just look to the bottom of the right-hand side of your stream. You should see an invite icon, like this: Select that, and you can invite anyone you like! About 30 minutes ago, this post covered an alternative way to doing invites before this official way became available. That’s below, for the curious: Officially, Google+ users still have no way to invite other people.

When I clicked on that “Learn more about Google+” button, I was taken to a page where I was invited to sign-up for Google+ using this alternative address.In short, if anyone sends something out of Google+ to those not already in it, it appears Google is letting some of those people in.Why do it this way, rather than give out invites? Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Overnight, Google has removed the invite feature.

We’ve shut down invite mechanism for the night. Related Topics: Channel: Social | Google: Google+ As Google+ Opens Up Will People Start Using It Correctly? Last night, I wrote up my initial thoughts on Google+ after using it for a day. Overall, I find it pretty compelling so far. While there is a bit of a learning curve, after about 15 minutes, I found myself at home using the service. And little things (namely notifications) kept bringing me back. But let’s be realistic, it has only been a day. Right now, almost every single post I see on Google+ is shared with the Public.

But tonight, Google started dishing out invites for early users to spread around as they see fit. By “correct”, I don’t mean to suggest that there is a set way to use Google+. That type of usage doesn’t seem tenable as Google+ gains users. More importantly, that would make Google+ just another slightly different version of Twitter, Facebook, etc. I think Google knows all of this. But as everyone has learned over the years, getting users to create and use groups is hard. Google has smartly made it so that you have to add people to Circles in order to “follow” them.

Google: Changes coming to Google+ this week. News July 11, 2011 12:02 PM ET Computerworld - It looks like Google will be making some changes to Google+ this week. In a post on Google+, Vic Gundotra, a senior vice president of engineering at Google, told his followers that users have been providing a lot of positive and negative feedback about Google's new social network, and that the company plans to respond to some of them this week.

"Lots of criticism for Google+," Gundotra wrote at about 2:05 a.m. Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said it's pretty clever for Google to fess up to the many complaints it's received about Google+. "It's like the Domino's [Pizza] ads," he added. Gottheil said he expects that Google will tackle issues related to Google+ invites and to the receipt of floods of notifications about everything from being added to a circle to referred to someone else. "I'm glad we're able to be a part of the formative stages of Google+," commented one user.