14 DAY TRIAL // Google+ has been, so far, very well received by the ones that got to try it out, at least considering the rather small expectations most people had for a Google social product. Even if hadn't been, the fact that it was only available to a few people created huge demand for others to get in.
But Google was adamant that it was a very limited field trial, when it was announced. It turns out that it wasn't so limited after all.
It didn't take long for people to figure out a way of getting people invitations and later Google officially started enabling people to invite others.
It didn't last long though, the huge demand and people sending out hundreds of invitations led Google to shut down the invite system within a few hours, saying that there were too many new users for this stage of the roll-out.
"We've shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you all for your interest!," Vic Gundotra, Google's head of social, wrote, in a Google+ update, of course.
"For any who wish to leave, please remember you can always exit and take your data with you by using Google Takeout," he added. "It's your data, your relationships, your identity."
It's unclear how long until Google opens up the invites tap again, but since it said this was just a field test, to get some feedback from actual users outside of Google, where the social network had been in testing with employees, it probably has enough new users for this stage already.
Not that Google minds all of the attention, the artificial scarcity of Gmail invites helped it out in the early stages and Google is perhaps trying to replicate the success. But Google+ is still more of a beta than anything else, there are rough edges and glitches, nothing major, but something that only early adopters will put up with.