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Comment by jgroome | Hacker News Reader

Very cool-looking, especially the cover photo for events. Should companies/bands/artists and the like start taking G+ seriously, this will be a big selling point (they love little branding opportunities like that).

Calendar integration: Just makes sense. Not really a feature so much as an obvious subfeature.

"Party Mode" looks promising. I'd say the only thing I don't like about Facebook's events is the lack of a group photo album for events, so Google have done well in integrating this.

But, again, until the people I know are actually on Plus, G+ events are just going to be something else just for the geeks.

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    until the people I know are actually on Plus, 
    G+ events are just going to be something else 
    just for the geeks

That should not a problem, as most of the people you know, have a Google account, and implicitly are subscribers of Google+

That's interesting. I like Google+, but none of my friends use it. Inviting them to events would be one way of getting them started. Would be even better if I could invite people without Google accounts by e-mail, to make it generally usable for everyone.

> Would be even better if I could invite people without Google accounts by e-mail, to make it generally usable for everyone.

You can do this now. Just type in an email address in the field where you add people/circles. The user who receives the invite can set his availability-status without having a + account. Anything else (posting, commenting, adding photos etc.) requires an account though.

Anything else (posting, commenting, adding photos etc.) requires an account though.

For now. Google's patent on "ghost profiles"[1] is probably intended to fix that.

[1]: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=_FULAgAAEBAJ&dq=s...

That's great! I'm trying this now. Hopefully Google isn't too clever here, though... I know that of the people I e-mailed use Google Apps, so perhaps Google detects that it's an Google Apps address and enforces Google+ account creation.

Sure. On paper, as a Google account holder, I'm a G+ user. But I'm not.

I haven't used it but I'm guessing that the invites will be tightly integrated with email. The user experience will probably be something like invite users by email. Ones that have gmail/G+ can click through to further integration. Others will simply see an invite page (a la evite).

It's only not a problem if they get alerted via email when people invite them to events. Unlike Facebook, people don't check their G+ every day, so it's more likely that they won't see that event being posted without explicitly being invited by email. And if that's the way G+ events are being promoted, I might as well just set up an email list.

There are opt-out email alerts, and you can also invite people without G+ profiles to the event. The advantages over an email list can be convenience for the sender, the look of the invitation, and additional features for those who have G+ profiles.

Just to reiterate, you can invite people using email addresses. They don't have to use G+, or even have a Google account, I believe.

I tested that with a yahoo address yesterday. And the yahoo address never showed up on G+ event page as Not Responded even though there was no error when I entered it. And I checked the yahoo mailbox and there was no invite email.

Wild. I'll see if I can test that out myself. It's possible that Yahoo was marking the email invites as spam, which would be a separate issue.

I can easily see Facebook implementing "party mode" for their events, especially with their new Camera app. If you take a photo, it checks if you are supposed to be at an event, and asks if you should post it there. No-brainer.

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