Google+ Events Lets You Invite All Circles To An Event, Spam Ensues

Yesterday Google announced the promising Google+ Events functionality at Google I/O.  However, one  feature  immediately irked many Google+ users, the ability for all Google+ users to invite other Google+ers to an event, even if they don’t have them in circles.  So any Google+ user can invite any other user to an event. Of course this led […]

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Yesterday Google announced the promising Google+ Events functionality at Google I/O.  However, one  feature  immediately irked many Google+ users, the ability for all Google+ users to invite other Google+ers to an event, even if they don’t have them in circles.  So any Google+ user can invite any other user to an event.

Of course this led to the worst in the community with and overflow of Google+ Event invites fired off to anyone and everyone.  All a user has to do is add “Your circles” to the event list:

Invite Circles

The result of the invite – all users in those circles will be updated.   Here’s a sample invite that came to me from someone that I do not have in my circles:

Invited

Nobody was more upset with this Google lapse than Wil Wheaton.  He stated:

Google’s Event thing is something the company has worked very hard on, and has a lot of big plans for.

It’s too bad that I’ll never use it, because Google has, yet again, made a product that may be useful and cool, but forced it upon users without giving users any control over how invasive it is.

I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but here’s what has happened to me today: my timeline, which I look at at least once an hour on a regular day, is nothing but invites to events from people I don’t know, or — worse — invites to an “event” that is really a spammy advertisement like “You’re invited to buy [something] at [dodgy website].

As a result, G+ is useless to me today, and for as long as it takes the company to actually fix this, assuming they ever do. Yeah, it’s a first world problem for me, but it’s also a problem for Google, because even if 1% of G+ users feel the same way I do, that’s a lot of people Google has unnecessarily pissed of and possibly alienated.

Google has identified this Events issue as a problem and is working on a fix.  Last night senior Vice-President of Social Business, Vic Gundotra stated:

Working on fix, pushing it to all data centers world wide now

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Greg Finn
Contributor
Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.

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