The big difference is that beta gmail could communicate with email from other providers. So it was exclusive but not really closed - you had a rare domain name, a huge inbox and the ability to send other people invites - that was pretty cool for 2005.
That's nothing like the Google+ launch - making that a closed beta was death from the start because you could only interact with the few other people in the closed beta.
On Episode 01 of The Social Radars podcast [1], Paul Buchheit, creator of GMail, explains that the Gmail invite-only beta was actually due to shortage in hardware and difficulties to scale the service, rather than a just a "growth hack". It seems they were running the service for a long time near 100% capacity.
GMail was a huge leap over existing web mail providers. Where others might give you tens of megabytes, GMail started with a gig and showed a ticker for its growth on the log in page. They offered keeping emails forever and making them searchable. People were willing to wait.
I think Gmail was a special case: a highly anticipated product that was better than anything else out there, it had a killer feature that was unheard of (1GB of storage and growing!), and you could immediately use it as your main email.
It didn't work out so well when they tried to reproduce that success by making Google Buzz invite-only. My feed consisted of a few people posting "buzz!" and then never posting again. Google+ was similar.
Facebook's early exclusivity was great for college kids and spreading amongst certain young people - making it cool. You had to have a .edu email to log in! It was also much better than Myspace.
Google+ was mediocre and not better than the competition. Young people didn't care about it. The exclusivity was generated by a company - it didn't appeal to the user's inherent bias. Facebook initially appealed to narcissism - the early users "knew" they were "better" than myspace users.
Don't know about others but I really enjoyed Google+. The tech groups around there were pretty great, heck even Linus Torvalds used it to post some rants at the time.
Reader and Google+ were services I really enjoyed using for content.
Google+ was excellent. I liked the social graph that was the "circles" (nice data mining of my effort to create the circles google) - this was in the days where when you posted to social media you were posting to people no to public.
Now that I think about it, my whatsapp groups intersect in a similar manner, and people post (manually) the same thing to multiple groups, but not every group we have in common.
That plus the real name policy[0]. One month after launch:
> Conflicts regarding Google+ began in July 2011 when the social networking site began enforcing its real name only policy by suspending the accounts of users it felt were not following the policy.
Sure, when it launched. But in 2023? I don't think there is a single feature that makes Gmail that special anymore. I would have preferred Outlook over Gmail these days anytime.
