Google Plus risks failure bybeing too exclusive

When Google revealed its new social project,
namely Google Plus and everyone wanted to be
invited to the party. That’s how Google has
usually rolled out services since they launched
Gmail. When Gmail was newly launched by
Google, having a Gmail account became quite
important for people.
If interest and exclusivity are benchmarks, then
Google + is scoring high. I have used Google+ for
a couple of days now and one thing I found
missing on it was the lack of invitations.
Even now the go around for inviting people is to
add them to Circles and then send them a
message. Usually they should be able to sign up
to Google Plus. But this is taking a lot of time,
possibly because of overload.
A social network without your friends is boring!
I used to be on Orkut a lot, about 5 years ago. I
resisted Facebook thinking none of my friends are
on it. Today almost everyone I know in life is on
Facebook and all my friends who I would catch
up on Orkut have either deleted their Orkut profile
or like me do not check it more than once or
twice a month.
Users need to have their friends get access to
their photos and updates and leave their
comments.
Google Plus does work around the problem by
allowing ‘Sharing via email only” option which
updates people via an email about stuff shared on
the Google + account. This allows only viewing of
updates and photos and email users cannot leave
their comments.
Hopefully, Google+ rolls out invites very fast and
stop faltering on this issue. Remember what
happened to Google Wave. It was a collaborative
tool meant for teams. As individuals who got the
invite could not find people they worked on
Google Wave, they found it quite useless despite
of Google Wave having some really cool features.
What do you think? Will the lack of invitations and
too much exclusivity kill Google+ before it starts?
Do drop in your comments.