“Already Invited? We’ve temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon.”

I’m getting sick of seeing that note every single time I head over to Google Plus. Sure, I asked them with a mouse click to keep me notified and send me something helpful when they decide to add more room, but since it has been a few days I find myself almost frothing at the mouth at the idea of whatever it is about this network that is supposed to be ‘social’.

Sure, people are using it. I have not exactly gone out of my way to find reviews or anything, but I despise the fact that I can not just run headlong into it and actually explore. Their interactive tour is incredibly bad, giving me almost no information for which to base my decision about whether or not I could actually see myself using the site in the future. The one thing I can say is that the “video hangout” idea is enough to make me at least want to experiment with it – however I am unable to because Google decided to open a social network with only a select number of seats available. It’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses of Internet Socializing. Open it up, Google! The longer you wait to let people in, the less people are going to be willing to even look at it because their interest peaked and then collapsed into a giant pile of Buzz.

Competing with Facebook is hard. Brain Surgery to a two-year-old hard. Squandering interest in a product is probably the last thing you want to do when getting into a market with only one major competitor who completely owns the turf you are trying to step foot on. In all honesty, Google might have a shot at making a dent in Facebook’s numbers. I doubt they will win, if only because Facebook is already engrained into people’s everyday workflows and internet usage, but based on the awful website tour I can at least see some potential. Granted, this potential could be easily pirated and adapted by Facebook (video, separate privacy ‘circles’, group chatting) and as a downside it would appear from the outside that Google has very little in the way of tertiary reasons for its usage because all the normal Google-y functions. Facebook’s gaming network is one of its main driving forces. People literally do nothing else while there but play them. They care not about pictures, video, and only desire friends if they can help them in their pursuit of gaming glory (well, okay, they might enjoy the pictures).

“Social” has a much broader meaning than just being able to connect with people, at least as far as Facebook is concerned. They want people to live on their site just as much as Google wants people to live and work on their site, never leaving except when a search happens to send them astray. Facebook doesn’t have Web Search, which is Google’s Prime Directive, but while it can be quite easy to lose a few hours in a day to farming or cooking or whatever other gaming one can do around Facebook, I am not exactly one to be firing up the search engine any more than a few times a day at most. Google is also pretty much all I use for search as well, unless I want to specifically look up something on Wikipedia, and yet I still do not consider that something worth joining another Network for.

Give us something, Google, and we will come. We might not exactly stay and redecorate, but at least we will tread across the carpets a few times and mess about with the lights and garbage disposal. In the grand scheme of things, that might not be exactly what you want. I get it. But until you open your doors nobody will ever be sure they even want to drive into the neighborhood, let alone move in and actually live there. Stop being apparently social and start, well, being Facebook. After all, that is all anyone really wants.

Class dismissed.