Google Spams Google+ Users After Disk Overload

Google’s new social media service Google+ got off to a bad start, as an error spammed users with multiple notification messages. Meanwhile, early reviewers were unimpressed, but the search giant is reportedly moving ahead with a business version.

Users of the new social media service received multiple notifications,  because the service ran out of disk space, admitted a blog post by Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of social: “For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes.”

Critical reaction

The incident added to a critical reaction from early reviewers. “It’s pretty embarrassing for Google+ to suffer from such a bug,” said Graham Cluley of Sophos. “You can hardly imagine how the site could conceivably ‘run out of disk space’, even if it is still technically undergoing trials.”

“Getting zillions of Google+ emails, including duplicates which is apparently a bug, ” tweeted BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, adding: “Already dubious about its usefulness…”

While early looks at Google+, such as Engadget’s, found it an interesting and promising new approach, more recent reviews have started to pick holes. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur, found it “laboured” and too complicated for people to actually pick up.

“Google’s biggest product, its search page, is a classic of simple design,” said Arthur. “But everything else it does becomes too complicated. Google+ might work better if it tried to do less, and then built it up.”