"Having read many claims that ‘Google+ will kick Facebook’s ass,’ I’ll go out on a limb..."

"... and predict that Google+ will fail miserably," says Henry Copeland.

[I]n social networks, the users are the product. Users’ habits and passions and commitments to each other are the life-force that makes a social network grow. Just as you can’t build a tree from a bunch of boards, you never could have constructed Facebook or Twitter or eBay or LinkedIn or Wikipedia top-down with a bunch of prefab components....

Google’s diffuse-by-invites strategy works fine for a tool like Gmail, which is evaluated purely as a feature set, but it won’t work for Google+. Evidence: my friend Dan Gilmore, who as an innovator and former reporter for San Jose Mercury News should have more Google+ connections than anybody, went onto Facebook to look for friends who might also be using Google+. With no luck.

That made me go check my gmail to see if I had an invite, which, it turns out, I did. I joined. I'll check it out and let you know what I think. It's like Facebook, but it's Google, right?