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 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:

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:

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

About The Author

Greg Finn

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.