Actor/geek Wil Wheaton started to see the results almost immediately, posting late Wednesday afternoon:

Did G+ roll out some new “invite everyone you follow to an event” thing? My feed is completely overwhelmed with “everyone’s invited to XXXXX event” notices, and I’m having a hard time actually seeing posts from people I’m following. … Is there a way to opt-out of event invites from people I don’t follow or have circled? Is this yet another thing Google rolled out without thinking it through clearly?

A little later, he was getting a better understanding of the new feature but it was too late:

It’s too bad that I’ll never use it, and will kill it with fire, 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.

Wheaton not only has a large following, he’s an active poster and checkers his Google+ feed every half hour or so when he’s online. He likes Google+ and is just as frustrated by what he sees as Google’s failure with it as he was with this feature gone awry:

Instead of talking about how cool this thing is, and how excited we are to use it, a significant number of G+ users — and people like Linus Torvalds, who are way more influential than I am are among them — are talking about how annoyed they are and how much they hate it.

Is that the rollout that Google was hoping for? Has Google learned nothing from doing things like this in the past? I’m starting to believe that this isn’t an accident, or poor planning, but by design; I just can’t figure out why.

Author John Scalzi was irked enough to post around midnight Wednesday:

My newest circle is “People who send me a ‘test’ Google Events Invite, and must therefore be torn apart by ravenous bears.” Try not to be in it. The bears are getting tired.

By Thursday, Wheaton was trying again, providing examples, to back up his contention that only people in your own circles should be allowed to send you Events. Among them: unwanted invitations and messages about the Guild Wars 2 release date. The last straw was someone who set up a fake event with Wheaton’s name in it, prompting him to warn “the system as it’s set up right now is ripe for abuse.”

That finally drew a chagrined response in Wheaton’s comments from Vic Gundotra, the Google SVP of engineering responsible for Google+:

“We are doing exactly what you requested. We should have contemplated and anticipated how people would abuse this and how painful this could be for celebrities with large followings.

We have pushed a number of fixes yesterday (some were bug fixes that showed up at scale). Expect more fixes today. Sorry for the trouble Will.”

The right response, although Gundotra shouldn’t have limited it to “celebrities” and should have been more clear about the fixes and bugs.

An exasperated Robert Scoble was still dealing with the aftereffects late Thursday afternoon when he broadcast on Google+ and Twitter that Google+ Events was “The worst social launch ever. WTF were you thinking Google?” He called out Gundotra directly, adding a new twist:

Not only did it spam the crap out of my notifications and my Google+ events page but it added events — hundreds of them — onto my calendar.

My calendar is MINE. Not yours. You should NEVER put anything on it that I don’t approve of.

Scoble said declining the events didn’t make them disappear, requiring hundreds of entries to be deleted by one by one. It’s not the end of the world but it’s the kind of tech time sink that can frustrate to the point of a primal scream.

Google also is showing an Events opt-in screen on Google Calendar. I was in a rush when I first saw it and decided to adhere to a rule I’ve been trying to follow: don’t opt in if you don’t have time to read the fine print.

Even now, it’s difficult to see from the splash screen or the “learn more” page just how much noise you might be agreeing to if you opt in.

If you look at events through Google+ instead of your Google calendar, you can start to figure it out by choosing settings and scrolling around a lot. There is still no simple or direct way to set parameters specifically for events, as far as I can tell.

Google needs Google+ Events to work for a number of reasons: it encourages interaction between features like Google+, calendar and Gmail; it’s social so should bring more Google+ users together; it encourages photo sharing; and it should bring new users in.

If Google can manage the parachute-bike-rappel routine that wowed the Moscone Center crowd, someone there ought to be able to figure out how to introduce new features without alienating its users.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The 2013 task management tools market
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

Software services and applications are becoming increasingly intertwined with users’ lives. And this connection is leading to increasing concerns about privacy. We have already seen service-to-user dissonance with the recent privacy controversies at Google, Apple and Path. As the co-founders of Glassmap, a real-time location sharing service, we have first hand experience with trying to resolve this dissonance.

Robert Scoble recently criticized Glassmap’s registration process as a severe violation of user privacy. If the “Post to Facebook” option was left checked, an invitation to join Glassmap would show up on the user’s timeline. Glassmap has admittedly benefited from the additional virality. But we also believe that in a boisterous, loose-sharing Facebook landscape, our target market of college students and young professionals benefited from attracting their friends to the service. (We are now eliminating this feature because Facebook told us to.)

However, a minor controversy like this hinders honest discussion regarding the more important issues at hand. Instead of giving into Silicon Valley sensationalism, we’d rather have a real dialogue about online privacy.

There are four things that really matter: real-time adaptiveness, transparency, the right amount of privacy, and user-service symmetry.

1. Real-time adaptiveness

Privacy desires and demands are much more dynamic than Internet companies currently account for. In the real world, we constantly shift privacy thresholds when we move from home to work to shopping to clubbing. Facebook has introduced “lists” and Google has introduced “circles” to more finely tune the complex temporality of users’ privacy preferences. However, even these attempts are curated on static, a priori information. Future services must find ways to dynamically adapt to their users’ shifting privacy thresholds.

2. Transparency

Users should be able to very clearly see what their actual privacy settings are (who they’re sharing with, what they’re sharing with them). They should also have straightforward, simple and fine-grained control of those settings. Social discovery applications like Highlight remove control from the user, allowing anyone the service deems acceptable to obtain your information. “Friends of friends” feels deceptively innocuous, but if your 500 friends each have 500 friends, a quarter million people might have access to your information. This lack of clarity results in the creepiness that is widely associated with these products.

3. The right amount of privacy

As social networks have shown repeatedly, more privacy is not necessarily better. Products cannot assume the user’s privacy preference lies at either extreme (share-everything or share-nothing). Instead, they must try to find the sweet spot in the middle of the continuum. Actions that adjust a user’s settings towards that optimum should therefore be made as easy and automatic as possible, so long as transparency and control are preserved.

4. User-service symmetry

While a lot of effort is spent on the design of both asymmetric and symmetric user-to-user relationships (subscribing, following, friending, etc.), less effort is spent on the relationship between the user and the service. As users offer their information to the service, the service must also present that information back to the user. Many privacy concerns revolve around simply not knowing what information a particular service has collected. Because social products now often act as proxies between users, openness between the service and their users becomes even more important.

This is how we think about privacy. We are optimistic about the power of information, and we are hopeful that a deeper understanding of it will result in meaningful and beneficial technologies for users.

Geoffrey Woo and Jon Zhang are co-founders of Glassmap, a real-time location sharing application available for iOS and Android. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Sean MacEntee.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Virtual Worlds: Trends and Opportunities
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

(Context: I’m a 31-year-old CEO of  a tech and creative agency, iStrategyLabs. This year will be my fourth trip to SXSW.)

1. Ask everyone what they’re up to before you pimp what you’re doing. Nobody cares about your crappy startup (even if it’s not crappy). People care about what they’re doing and what their problems are. If you can help them with what they’re doing, or solve their problem, then they’re instantly going to love you.
2. Don’t sell too hard or you’ll just look like a schmuck. Although SXSW is only a few days long, it is both a sprint and a marathon. I’ve done deals with people two or three years after first meeting them at SXSW. Those have been the biggest and best deals of my career, and they didn’t come about because I went to SXSW to sell something.
3. Love first. Sales second. There’s plenty of time to sell after SXSW. But there’s a limited amount of time during the conference to meet lots of people and make them absolutely love you. Focus on getting people to fall in love with you, and everything else will follow.
4. Working a room of 100 amazing people is better than hitting 10 events filled with less-than-awesome people. Party and panel hopping is great. I do a ton of it, but I only leave if the people aren’t awesome. If they are amazing, I stay there as long as it makes sense. Amazing is subjective. You need to figure this out for yourself. For me, amazing people are those who teach me something new. If I’m not learning, I move on.
5. Shticks are valuable social devices. Have at least one. You need something to talk about other than your startup. For example, this year GE hired us to hack one of their appliances so that people have to use Foursquare check-ins to get the beer GE put inside. That’s cool. I can pimp that to everyone, and tell them to go check in to get free beer. They don’t care about “iStrategyLabs’s new Social Machines offering that does blah blah blah.” They want free beer. They’ll tell other people about the cool way I hooked them up with free beer. A few months from now, this will lead to someone hiring me and paying me $200,000. All because they remembered the free beer.
6. Don’t linger. Lingerers are lame. Absolutely never sweat the web-celebs. Even if you see Shira Lazar, Pete Cashmore, Robert Scoble and Kevin Rose hanging out at Six Lounge, don’t get all up in their grill like a high school basket ball fan meeting LeBron James. Talk to people like they’re just as influential as you are and that they’re normal humans. Say hello. Try to make a real connection. And move on — quickly.
7. Forget about balancing work and fun. Eat this festival alive, and come out the other end ready to step up your game. If you’re at SXSW, your work is probably really fun. If you work isn’t fun — then you should be looking for a new job at SXSW.
8. Guys: Don’t be a non-stop hit-on-cute-tech-and-Texas-girls machine. That’s the creepiest thing you could do. It could damage your personal brand and your company, and you might miss an opportunity to connect meaningfully with the opposite sex – cutting off the possibility of a great business outcome or long-term friendship.
9. Gals: Avoid the mechanical bull at the Rebels Honky-Tonk. Seriously. You don’t want to end up tagged on Facebook by colleagues when you’re half (or fully drunk) and potentially exposing yourself. I’ve seen this happen.
10. Geeks of all stripes: Don’t trust anyone who says SXSW sucks. That’s like saying chocolate doesn’t taste good or that sunsets are ugly. It’s just crazy talk. Your SXSW lanyard is your golden ticket to personal and professional nerd heaven. Enjoy it!

Peter Corbett is the CEO of iStrategyLabs, a creative social agency. He tweets at @corbett3000.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Web startups: How to guard against security breaches
• Pinterest: signs of staying power

In another example of why web startups both love and hate attracting the attention of Robert Scoble, the widely-followed blogger and social-media maven created a minor firestorm over the weekend about Quora, the hot question-and-answer site that could be worth as much as $300 million. After initially embracing the service, which he called “the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years,” Scoble wrote that he had changed his mind and was no longer as interested in Quora for a number of reasons, including the way his responses have been treated on the site.

It might seem as though this dustup is of interest only to Scoble fans and other Silicon Valley insiders, but it has focused another spotlight on some important hurdles that Quora has to face as it tries to grow.

Just to recap, Scoble celebrated Quora as a revolution in blogging in December — one of a number of mentions that helped generate a flood of new users for the service, which a Quora engineer discussed in a post on the site. Among other things, Scoble liked the ability to follow questions, to vote things up Friendfeed-style, and the addictive quality of being able to see questions and answers being posted in real time. On the weekend, however, he said that he had reconsidered and that it was a “horrid service,” in part because of the way his answers got down-voted and hidden by the site’s moderators (there’s a discussion of the problems with Scoble’s activity on Quora if you’re interested, and Scoble himself has written about his mistakes in using the service as well).

Quora’s biggest challenge, as I have written before, is to expand its appeal and broaden its reach — partly in order to justify that $300-million valuation — but without negatively affecting the quality of answers that are the Quora’s main claim to fame. That commitment to quality is something that co-founder and former Facebook staffer Charlie Cheever has reiterated in interviews (including one with me), and is the key to avoiding the fate of similar services such as Yahoo Answers, which have been overwhelmed with low-quality content to the point where they are functionally useless. Cheever has written on Quora about this challenge, and some of the things that the service is working on to try and help maintain a high level of quality in both questions and answers.

The issue that Scoble’s experience highlights is this: in online communities like the one Quora is trying to build, there is a need for mavens like him — they help promote a new service, as the uber-blogger did with FriendFeed in its early days, before it was acquired by Facebook and co-founder Bret Taylor became the company’s chief technology officer. Their attention can create some scaling problems, since they often bring massive waves of new users and traffic, but they are still crucial to widespread adoption. At the same time, however, they can also distort these same services by their use (I confess that one of the reasons I soured on FriendFeed was the ubiquitousness of Scoble and other social-media types). And as Scoble himself has admitted, they sometimes get things wrong — like the assumption that Quora was going to become a Friendfeed-style blogging engine.

That misunderstanding, meanwhile, highlights another issue with Quora: it is arguably still too difficult to understand what kind of service it is trying to be. Is it trying to be social and conversational like a blog or other social-media tools like Twitter? No. In fact, overly conversational and even humorous answers get voted down or hidden by site moderators (an activity that should probably be explained better, so that users can understand what behavior is appropriate and what is not). Mike Arrington is right that Quora seems focused on creating something much more like Wikipedia — when I spoke with Charlie Cheever, he described how he hoped to make Quora serve a similar function, but for topics that Wikipedia doesn’t think are important enough.

The big issue for Quora is that becoming a new kind of Wikipedia is an honorable goal, but it is never going to become a mainstream service by doing so, just as contributing to Wikipedia is still something that only a tiny fraction of the online population ever does. But if it concentrates just on high-quality answers to arcane questions, and cracks down on personality and the other things that attract users like Robert Scoble, how is it ever going to grow to the point where it can justify a market value of $300 million? For more on the question of Quora and its long-term value, see analyst David Card’s recent report for GigaOM Pro, “Is Quora Worth the Hype?” (subscription required).

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

• Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
• Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners
• What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr users Steve Jurvetson and Alexander Rachmann

While during a demo, startups have to explain what their offering is and how it works, that’s only one part of a successful pitch. “There’s been a lack of focus on distribution,” said Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and now the head of a $300 million venture fund. “The typical path a lot of startups take is they launch their product and no one finds out about it.” They also need to do a better job explaining how they’re going to catalyze the industry. As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s put it after viewing demos, “I didn’t see anything where I thought ‘Oh wow, I think this will change the world.’”

When it comes to social networking, Facebook may have already done that, noting this week that it now has 300 million users worldwide. Robert Scoble, a known enthusiast of the space, said social media-focused companies should be looking to integrate Facebook Connect or OAuth into their services. But one startup, Stribe, is trying to reinvent the wheel by developing a technology that lets publishers build social networks around their web sites. While Stribe’s technology is impressive, it provides a service we could happily live without.

As for those that are looking to build their business around the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, they need to offer something unique and something that adds value to those companies’ existing features. For example, Radiusly has developed a web-based service that lets companies create authorized profiles for Twitter and manage their accounts. A company profile would offer, say, links to its employees’ profiles. But Twitter already offers verified accounts for well-known executives and there’s a host of startups, such as CoTweet and HootSuite, that are focused on helping companies manage their Twitter accounts.

RedBeacon, a web site that connects people to local services and apparently hit all the right notes with its pitch, was crowned the winner of the event. On RedBeacon, people can post jobs they need done, such as house cleaning or gardening, and local service providers can bid on how much they’ll charge to do the job and when they’ll complete it. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, founded by three ex-Googlers, is the startup to keep on your radar this year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

Robert Scoble Leaves Fast Company TV; sponsor Seagate backed out; blogger doesn’t say what his next gig will be. (TechCrunch, Scobleizer)

NBC Wants Branded Web Content; NBCU VP Cameron Death says the network is “over-investing” on the web and planning “to over-deliver.” (MediaPost)

Ustream Does Celeb Mobile Live Streaming; moves to challenge Kyte, which has already tied up a lot of these deals. (Ustream blog)

Cathay Pacific Apologizes to Angry Woman Who Missed Flight; airline employee made video of woman’s ridiculous tantrum that has 5 million views. (video, BusinessWeek)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• Are Web Apps Becoming Over-Reliant on One Another?

It is not a new concept — since their early days blogs were all about sociability. Late last year, we backed Chris Messina’s wild idea that WordPress, the open-source blogging software that we use to power majority of our network blogs, could be become the underpinning for a social network. In January, Automattic, the company behind WordPress and the free hosted blogging service WordPress.com, bought BuddyPress to help bring sociability to blogs. (Disclosure: Automattic was started by Matt Mullenweg, a close friend of mine. We share True Ventures as an investor.)

Our friends at ReadWriteWeb theorize that in order for blogging to evolve, the blogging systems need to embrace the newly popular life-streaming services such as Twitter and FriendFeed, along with a growing panoply of personal web services (including the most fabulous, Dopplr). The team at Six Apart has combined the above-mentioned ideas to create Moveable Type Pro, a blog-publishing system with extremely social DNA. (Check out the Six Apart blog for details.)

Blogging Needs To Evolve

Six Apart is making the right move, for it is time for blogging to evolve. Many of us have forgotten that blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections. For instance, through comments I met folks like Robert Young, who in turn wrote for the blog, and then in the process became a friend. It is time to re-embrace and extend that philosophy.

Establishing those kinds of relationships becomes an even bigger challenge as newer tools emerge, enabling new kinds of sharing. Whether it is Friendfeed or Dopplr, videos or photos, we are constantly figuring out ways to share information about us on the web. In other words, our digital life is spreading out across the web.

Blog = Digital Life Aggregator

We have two choices in order to consolidate these — either opt for all-purpose services such as Facebook (as tens of millions have done) or use our blogs as the aggregation point or hub for all these various services. Facebook, for instance allows you to share photos, aggregate your digital droppings, share comments with friends and exchange messages, but it doesn’t give you a unique identity on the web. In contrast, blogs with social features could allow you to do exactly that.

Marc Canter has been talking about this digital aggregator forever and has been ahead of the curve, though now pieces have started to fall in place. Robert Scoble is a good example of how and where things might be headed. He uses multiple services, and they are all easily consumable on his blog, where he writes longer, more engaging posts. His short conversational posts of yesteryear have migrated to FriendFeed, his video has bifurcated into long-form or live, short-form videos. I know Scoble is an outlier of this trend, but he was also ahead of the curve six years ago as far as blogging is concerned.

The Demographic Shift

As a society, we are entering an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies — a theory that is articulated in Wired’s recent cover story. As the Wired writer quips, “Like it or not, we are all public figures now — famous, as the new cliché goes, for 15 people.”

The evolution of blogging platforms needs to match these societal and demographic changes. I think folks who are blogging now (no, not just tech bloggers) are different from some of us early bloggers — they use different tools and services and have different views of sharing. In many ways MySpace and Facebook have changed what is OK, and what is not OK online.

With that as a sub-text, it is good to see the blogging systems start to evolve. Kudos to Six Apart for making the first major move. Suddenly, blogging tools are more fun — and social.

Open Question: How will you build the next-generation blogging system? I am going to be discussing this question with various attendees of WordCamp 2008 that is being held in San Francisco this weekend. I am speaking at the camp and have a exciting announcement as well.

PS: Get ready for BlogActionDay.org by registering your blogs, watch the new video, and become part of the movement that is about blogs making a change in our world.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Of course Twitter’s most popular user is Robert Scoble, and as far as numerous successive posts have argued, he is the real source of the problem (prompting some not-unexpected foot-stomping on Scoble’s part).

I wrote about Twitter’s problem in a post last weekend and how they should charge for people like Scoble, Michael Arrington and myself for using their system so aggressively. Our use of Twitter benefits our businesses. Links to Scoble’s posts can drive traffic to his site or his videos, which in turn drives attention to his work and his employer. Same holds true for Michael and for me. On a more philosophical basis, it allows us to stay in touch with our readers, who in turn keep us in business.

Nevertheless, since common sense and paid services are apparently not part of this brave new Web 2.0 world, my idea didn’t play well. What was I thinking? Instead there’s this belief that Twitter, the ultimate tool of our collective narcissism, should be so lucky to have super users, that they are what make it popular with everybody else. I don’t subscribe to that point of view, but hey that’s just me.

For Twitter, the challenge of keeping the service going while at the same time fixing it to scale up is immense. Thankfully they have the money and what looks like the will to fix the problems. Will they? We shall see!

Update: The debate about Twitter rages on. Scoble met with Twitter team and talked about the various issues in a video interview. I got an email from Even Williams who is one of the founders of Twitter and this is what he had to stay:

We like the idea of charging for commercial use. That’s something we’ve been talking about for a long time (you can probably find my quoted saying that from a year ago). We’re just not there yet.

Given all different opinions, and other issues that have emerged, I have to reiterate that by charging the super users, I am suggesting that costs will bring in a sense of responsibility to the entire ecosystem. When there is no tax involved, there is no cost to having thousands of followers, or sending hundreds of messages. When asked to pay, heavier users will use the system responsibly.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013