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Re:Facebook Will Launch In-Browser Video Chat Next Week In P... by saurik on Saturday July 02, 2011 @12:27AM (#2721005)
But taking a random sample of people and getting a hopefully-large-enough subset of their friends is not what you want for a social product: you want all of your friends in it, or you just get frustrated and go back to your previous solutions. Facebook /nailed this/ with their multi-year long staged rollout by targeting colleges: already self-contained social ecosystems where almost all of a student's friends are going to be other students; you start with one college, then two, then slowly ramp up until you can flip the big switch. Google simply does not understand this, and keeps falling back to their experience with Gmail, which was a fundamentally different beast.
Re:Facebook Will Launch In-Browser Video Chat Next Week In P... by vijaydev on Saturday July 02, 2011 @05:16AM (#2721337)
Can you tell what would you have them do instead of going invite based? Also, considering the constraints that others have mentioned.
Re:Facebook Will Launch In-Browser Video Chat Next Week In P... by saurik on Saturday July 02, 2011 @05:42AM (#2721364)
"Everyone in the City of New York now has Google+: enjoy!"

(Also, I'm somewhat confused by the question, as I specifically demonstrated something that is akin to a suggestion by way of demonstrating what Facebook did right... why are you asking this? There are a million ways to do "invite closed communities rather than random people", like allowing Google Apps domains to join rather than people: that way you at least could get "my company/organization circle" or something; you could imagine inviting e-mail domains, so "anyone with ucsb.edu e-mail addresses now gets on", etc.: the problem is that I now know a small handful of my friends who are using Google+, but as most of my friends can't I will rapidly tire of posting there when I can post to Facebook.)