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Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are enjoying Google+ right now. What’s stopping Google from letting millions more join in the fun?

By Lance Ulanoff

Google+ will not become the social network it wants to be until Google lets everybody in. Open the doors, Google. Take the heat. It’s going to take some time to reach three quarters of a billion users.

Google+ is only a week old, but I’m now on record demanding that the search engine giant open thisremarkably polished social-networking playground to the masses. It seems, though, I am alone in my opinion. When I posted the above sentiment on Google+, I was met with a flood of disagreement (and a teeny tiny bit of agreement).

"It’s in beta," they argued. I reminded them that Gmail was in beta for years, yet open to all. "Limiting supply" will only fuel demand, they told me. They reminded me that Google often starts with closed betas (they did do this on Gmail), and I countered with "foolish consistencies are the hobgoblins of little minds." Actually, I never said that. In fact, the conversation was so interesting—it even included a surprise appearances by TwiT founder and star Leo Laporte and lengthy posts from Geek.com’s Russell Holly—that I decided to let the conversation speak for itself.

Where possible, I’ve removed the timestamps and anything that was clearly off-topic, and cleaned up egregious typos and misspellings (not just my own). You’ll note that I informed all who were in the thread that I might turn the whole conversation into a column. By the way, for all I know the conversation is still ongoing. You can view it here if you have a Google account, but you can’t participate unless you’re a Google+ member.

VA set to spend billions on IT.

Computerworld - The U.S. Veterans Administration is making upward of $12 billion in IT contracts available to businesses over the next five years, as part of an effort to modernize its operations.

The VA spends about $3.5 billion annually in IT, a figure that Input, a government market research, estimates is increasing at 10% annually as demand for veterans’ services increases, said Kevin Plexico, an analyst at the Reston, Va.-based firm.

The VA has changed how it acquires technology, creating a program called Transformation Twenty-One total Technology or T-4 for short. Previously, the VA would acquire much of technology through blanket contracts that General Services Administration negotiated with tech vendors.

But with T4, the VA is shifting to its own purchasing and creating a one-stop shop. It is doing this to gain more control more control over vendor selection and management, said Plexico.

In a speech this month at a meeting of Veterans small businesses convention, Eric Shinseki, the VA secretary, told the group that the “VA’s information technology issues are significant.”

The agency has been canceling IT projects that haven’t met expectations, including a decision this month to drop a $500 million project to modernize financial management systems.

The VA’s T4 spending plan includes $7 billion in VA IT procurement, or about $1 billion a year over the next five years. Another $5 billion will come through other VA contracts with other agencies. The VA last week

The VA contracts will cover a full range of IT services, including security, networks, and hardware from the desktops to data centers.

The agency is also hiring IT workers. Of the 1,200 IT jobs being advertised by the federal government, approximately 200 are VA related. The Department of Homeland Security has 274 IT openings.

Federal agencies are, overall, more optimistic about their ability to hire IT workers in the months ahead, according to a new survey. An ongoing survey of federal and state hiring trends by the CDW in its IT Monitor found that 29% of federal IT decision makers expect to hire IT staff, up 9 percentage points from April.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues forComputerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at  @DCgov or subscribe toPatrick’s RSS feed . His e-mail address ispthibodeau@computerworld.com.