this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Google+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.
In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that's been way more successful than G+
Gmail was also both "federated" and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn't all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.
Gmail was literally the best. 1GB space at launch when you'd get a dozen MB in Hotmail and others, slick fast UI in a browser.
And you got more space the longer you had the account! Then everyone got the same no matter what. I was sad to loose all that free space.
“Never delete an email”. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
IIRC, that was rolled out as a surprise after a few years. People were just like, "WTF, my capacity is getting bigger?". For a while there, Goggle could do no wrong from a marketing standpoint. That, uhh, changed.
Hotmail was 2mb.
It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.
Gmail was invite only at first probably because Google didn't want it to grow faster than they could buy hard drives. It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge. I'm certain they did that for technical reasons.
You're right, but for those who may not know the details or the impact at the time, Google was offering 500x more storage - at the free tier - than some of the competition - hotmail - who were charging people for just 10 MB of storage. This forced hotmail to increase its free tier to 250 MB and 2 GB for customers paying $20 USD/year.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230815014711/https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/hotmail-to-offer-250mb-of-free-storage/
It's hard to explain what an absolute paradigm shift Gmail was. It was about as drastic a difference as you could have with personal email without altering the core service. Orders of magnitude more storage, completely free to the end user, a responsive and usable web interface, a single unobtrusive 1-line text ad when we were used to at least half a dozen that were often full-size banners or even popups, and a good search tool.
My wife (then fiancee) got us invites, and it was like Christmas. And all from the company that was way less creepy than Microsoft! I'm sure that part would never change.
Might Bluesky be doing the same?
Slow roll until the infrastructure can handle it and a little bit of that "exclusive" feel to it since not everyone can just join immediately.
So more Gmail than G+
Yeah they're working hard on scaling, they've had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now
It's also easier to find and fix bugs with smaller numbers of people, especially performance bugs which can be amplified at scale. So it gives them a lot of time to work through issues over the beta. It also gives them time to build teams around the expanding infrastructure and build processes for monitoring and handling issues as a larger team.
Plus, these invite only periods start with more tech savy early adopters who more willing to put up with issues, and willing to provide decent bug reports to fix them.
"i am the choosen one!" As if...
Boy, our servers are ducktaped!
I'm still salty about that. Google+ was fantastic on release. Simple, clean, elegant, and fast. Then they steadily, systematically fucked it up. By the time it was cancelled, it had become unusable.
G+'s downfall was they kept it invite-only too long. Demand was there, people wanted in but Google was like, "Nah..."
By the time it was open-access, everyone had moved on or back to their old social media platforms. It could've been great, but Google, in typical Google fashion, got distracted by something shiny and killed it.
The sad thing is, if they'd thought even a tiny bit laterally and leveraged the fact that Google Reader was getting a lot of traction and a core of people were beginning to use its social functions, they could have backdoored themselves into being Digg/Reddit/Etc. and had the social media userbase to take on Facebook organically.
Instead, they fought the last war (Gmail vs Hotmail), intentionally eroded and then killed Reader, and with G+ they completely fucked up what was a cleaner interface (if not all that special) and a better technological experience, all while they were a brand that was at that time more trusted than their competitors.
Yep. Once they screwed up G+, I committed to never becoming dependent on any Google service beyond Drive and Gmail, and only those two because they're completely untouchable - Google couldn't break those without having a mass rebellion on its hands.