UPDATE: Well, I remembered a Google account I created a few years ago, and no longer user. With this, I was able to create a public profile and join Google+. But what is the point? That account is separate from the one I now use for all of my other activities. So I will have yet another disconnected social network. Yay.
I thought I would try out Google+ this week, since the press is marketing it so well and everyone else seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of the “game-changing” technology (how I hate that term!). After all, a significant part of my work is around web-based collaboration and I have been an early adopter of most social networking technologies (trying to remember my 5 digit ICQ number).
One of my Twitter connections was happy enough to send me an invite, to my Google hosted email address on the same domain as this blog.
I immediately see the following message:
(BTW, Google, lose the “Oops”. We are not in Grade 1.)
I proceed to spend the next hour trying to figure out how to create a Google Profile. I am pretty sure that I am at least as smart as the average Internet user, and probably smarter than some. It should not be this hard to register for a service.
I eventually came to the conclusion that I cannot do it for my fyeomans.com email address.
It appears that if I want to use Google+, I will have to create yet another account email address (to go with the 5 or 6 I already use) and get someone to invite me at THAT address.
Not something I am going to be bothered doing.
While I realize that supposedly 10 million people have already signed up for Google+, remember that that is a drop in the bucket of internet users.
And if you create barriers to people using the technology, it fail at badly as Buzz did.
Just my 2 cents. I would love to comment on the service itself, but well, I can’t.
FredSpace 