One month after its launch and still no invite to join Google Plus!

Its hard to believe, I know, that a key online influencer like me has been left out of the party, but it seems I’m persona non grata at Google.

Google’s latest attempt at creating a social network to rival Facebook appears to be off to a flying start with 25m users signed up so far – yet no one has thought to invite me!

Apparently Lady Gaga is on there along with Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Oprah Winfrey and even William Shatner who is presumably now exploring cyberspace, the final frontier.

The G+ project as it’s known, is currently an invite-only social network. Only people already on G+ can invite others to join which, by accident or genius, has turned into a brilliant marketing ploy.

Google’s last two attempts to create a social network, Wave and Buzz, petered out quickly, some say through lack of truly innovative features. However, Google has worked out that “celebrity acquisition” is key to success this time.

But which of the celebs already acquired are actually posting for themselves or indeed phony? I’ve been told that Jesus Christ turned up as a user, prompting Google to only allow real names on the network, although it’s not clear how they will be validated (It’s notoriously hard to prove you’re the messiah).

At this point I would have liked to review the network itself; its clever friend Circles, Hangout and Huddle concepts designed to make our online social lives easier – but as you now know, I’m NFI, and have no access.

Weather G+ succeeds in toppling Facebook, without my help, is yet to be decided. Facebook took 3 years to reach 25m users, Twitter took only 30 months, yet despite being invite-only G+ has passed this milestone in a few short weeks and could be here to stay.

So if you are one of the chosen few, I’d really appreciate an invite?

Now, I’ve finally got my LinkedIn status hooked up to my Twitter feed, my blog posting to my Facebook page and can just about monitor everything from my phone.

The last thing I’m inclined to do right now is join another time consuming social network!

Before I got my current collection under control, I barely had time to check my email and when I did it was full of mail from my social networks, alerting me to new activity forcing me to return.

Even with its 146 million captive Gmail users, Google has its work cut out if it is to get enough people using Buzz to make it worth my while.

Google tried before with a social network called Orkut, but failed to make it a global success – so why are they having another go?

Well Google is under attack from the social networks on two fronts.

Firstly, Google sells adverting space and as consumers spend increasing amounts of time on social networking sites advertising budgets are migrating there too.

Secondly, people are increasingly using their social networks to communicate instead of email. Mostly because they want to talk about content and social networks are designed to associate content with conversation.

Facebook is rumored to be upgrading its messaging system to be more email like. The project is code named Titan. Some are calling Titan the “Gmail killer”, which is why Google might be worried.

This also explains why Google has integrated Buzz with other popular networks, like Twitter, Flickr and its own blog site eblogger, but not the more popular Facebook!

Increasingly people are keeping a traditional email address for their professional lives, for colleges and customers, but conducting their personal communication via social networks.

Whether future generations of net citizens want their main email integrated with their social networks or, as Google hopes, the other way round is yet to be seen.

Considering it is the largest media owner in the world, Google is very bad at communicating with its users – which, lets face it, is most of us.

Back in December Google slipped Personalised Search into our lives, but few peopled noticed.

Google is always fiddling, or ‘refining’ as it calls it, with its algorithm, the one that determined which sites we see at the top of our search results pages.

Usually you need to be a search engine optimisation (SEO) expert or a real geek to spot the changes, or follow Google’s official blog.

But now even normal people are noticing that their search engine results are becoming very different to those of other people – even when they search with the same words!

Basically, Personalised Search means that once you have visited a website, via its results pages, Google is now more likely to offer you the site again, in future search results.

Now, if you’re an advocate of personal privacy, an international terrorist, or part of an organised crime syndicate you already know that Google records you’re every move and you’ve worked out a way of turning its tracking off.

However, those of us who don’t fit into the above categories have not really been that bothered. But now that Google is using this information to choose websites for us, perhaps we should be bothered.

Fundamentally, I use a search engine to find websites I don’t already know about. I have other mechanisms for recalling websites from previous interest; bookmarks and news feeds (RSS) for instance.

And whether my own previous misjudgment in site selection is a good way of determining what sites I see in the future is highly debatable too!

You can of course turn off personalised search, but it is now on by default and few users will be aware of this or work out how to turn it off. Previously you had to be logged into iGoogle to get this ‘useful feature’ but now everyone is unwittingly lumbered with it.

This makes it very difficult to prove money spent on SEO is justified. If everyone is getting different results, how can you know your SEO is working?

Alternatively, the unsuspecting client, who visits their own website on a regular basis, might think their SEO consultant is doing an amazing job, as their site seems to turn up on every relevant search they do.

So if you’re site has suddenly become number one in Google, for your targeted keywords, but this hasn’t turned into an avalanche of website visitors – and of course you’ve read this, you will now know why.