Google's new event invitations can be sent to anyone, not just those inside your circles. They're working on protecting the biggest users from spam, but Kim Kardashian is still open for invitations.
My first Google+ Events invite appeared in my inbox Sunday — but it wasn't exactly for my favorite kind of party. It was in Egypt, with 100 people I didn't know, hosted by someone I had never met. Yet Mohamed Khalaf, someone outside my oh-so-sacred circles, thought I should attend the "love is me" gathering.
I don't use Google+, nor do any of my friends, so maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised to get the spam invite. Google only introduced their fancy new evites — complete with customized MOVING themes and "party mode" real-time streaming photos — two weeks ago, so I guess some kinks are to be expected. They were quick to fix the issue that automatically added events to users' calendars when the obscure celebrities that actively use Google+ voiced their frustration.
Bad news for Wil Wheaton, though, because even though event invitations from people outside your circles will no longer be added to your calendar, anyone in the Google+ world can still invite you to their party — and Google doesn't plan on changing this.
"Since Google+ is still growing very quickly, it’s possible that people you know aren’t in your circles yet. In addition, there are some cases where there are people who you don't know or aren't in your circles and it's appropriate for them to send you an invite to an event," a Google spokesperson told us.
Okay, maybe there are SOME cases where it's appropriate, but what about ALL the other instances?
To test this out, we created an event and tried to invite a bunch of celebrities via their Google+ accounts. Michael Jordan, Ghandi and Larry Page were among the attempted invitees, but for some reason their invitations wouldn't send — the only celeb we managed to successfully spam was Kim Kardashian. It said that the others' invitations had sent, but Kim was the only one who actually showed up on the guest list.
