No. Facebook created a collection of small social networks centered around existing real-world communities, then finally linked up all of those small social networks into a single, larger social network. This allowed them to reach saturation on a campus-by-campus basis, until they had finally progressed far enough to reach a tipping point in society at large.

But you can't make the same development with Google's demographic. People you know with a Google account are disparate - friends, online colleagues, family? Filtering down through the geeky to the end user makes sense for them I think.

Not really. Facebook opened it up to entire colleges at a time. So once you were able to get on, most of your friends were able to, too.

What was FB's initial college roll out? Tens of thousands of users? I suspect Google would have several times that many in the few minutes of a full roll out.

FB's initial roll out was to people in the same (real life) social circles. You can't do social networking with a bunch of random people across the world.

This hits a nail on the head. Facebook knew the primary target for it's initial growth. Who is Google+ targeting first for early adoption?

Google does so many things for many different people. Opening it up to the world outright is technically dangerous, but Facebook had a very natural progression for rolling out because they had identified and located their market. Google isn't so lucky. + is designed at the Facebook user base, but isnt considering the history or the trajectory of Facebook users.

I'd imagine the only reason google cares about social at all is because it is a significant source of revenue in an industry they want to own (advertising).

All that said I'm going to set up an account when it's my turn.

Well, Harvard's UG enrollment is about 7k.

I bet those inside Google+ at this early stage can invite others in as well.

There's a very big difference between A) being the only person in, with the ability to invite any of your friends in and B) everyone else already being in. Even if you could invite all your friends in, the only motivation for them to accept and actually join is you (not an entire network yet, until they all accept) which is never going to be enough motivation.

Currently those inside + at the moment cannot invite others. It will probably change soon, but I think the initial rollouts are still going on, so for the time being I cannot invite others.

Out of curiosity, do you know or have a hypothesis for why you were invited? It seems like there are a decent number of people here who have been invited, but many who have not, with a similar trend for #googleplus on twitter, and I've yet to discern a sensible pattern.

Friends of Google employees? That's how I got my invite...

My friend is a summer intern at Google (this year and last). He got myself and our entire Wave "crew" invited.

Not all 'private invites' are created equal. Facebook isolated it to a single campus at a time. This meant all your friends were on Facebook, or none of them were. See the difference?

They really didn't. Facebook had a small target audience originally. You also had to know somebody to get it. Rather than having a closed beta, they were building scarcity and exclusivity at the beginning.

The exclusivity was also emphasized by everyone knowing it had come out of Harvard at the very beginning, which had and has a social cachet that Google Plus won't.

Maybe Google will be smart enough to let people through in groups that they believe to be socially linked by their online exhaust. They've got a decent sense of these things already.

Otherwise, it's really not the same thing at all.