Associated Press writer Rachel Metz covers InviteShare, the company we acquired last month that lets users get hard-to-find invitations to private betas. I spoke to Rachel a couple of times while she researched the article. She mentions the fact that some startups might not like the fact that InviteShare allows people to bypass the normal invitation mechanisms they set up. But she also gets the fact that if someone wants into a beta badly enough to go through InviteShare, they are probably the perfect person to test the product. And the days of people paying for beta invitations on eBay should be long gone now. → Read More

Getting invitations to private betas can be a frustrating experience for early adopters. If you don’t know someone who’s already in the beta it could end up being a very long wait. Over the last few years invitations for some betas were so hard to get that they ended up for sale on eBay – Gmail is the most famous example but recently Pownce invites were also put up for sale. About a month ago we had the idea of creating a fairly simple website that could match users who have invites to those that want them. We started building it but before we were ready to launch an identical service, InviteShare, came on the scene (created by Jeff Broderick at EkinDesigns). I liked it, and I wrote about it last week. The site now has about 14,000 registered users and 15,000 invites have been sent out. After talking things over with Heather (our CEO), we decided it would be bad form to launch a product that served the same purpose as InviteShare without at least trying to acquire or partner with them. We reached out to Jeff to buy the service, but before we began talking to him he put it up for sale. We bid against a few others and acquired the company. Did we pay more for the service because we had written about? Almost certainly, given how much weight Jeff gave to the TechCrunch post (and all of the press that followed) when describing the service on the sale page. And I’m ok with that. Jeff created a simple but very useful service that our readers will want to use. He deserves to be rewarded for that creativity and effort. We’ll be making some stability and minor feature changes to the service over the coming weeks and possibly moving it to a “crunchier” domain name, but for the most part it will remain the same. Try it out if you want a beta invite to one of those hard to get to new services. We have not completed server migration yet, so there may continue to be slow page loads or outages. Everything should be all set by end of day today. → Read More

One of the most frustrating things for early adopters like ourselves to deal with is the private, limited invitation beta. The startups seed a few invitations to their friends, and each new account has 3 or so invitations that can be given away. If you know the founders or one of the very early users, you can get in quickly. But if you don’t, you often have to wait a long time to see a new product. Startups love this, of course. They’ve created scarcity around a virtual good and that creates buzz. The most successful products can count on invitations being sold on eBay – something we saw with Gmail in 2004 and more recently with Pownce. A month or so ago we had the idea to create an email based product that linked people with early invites to beta services to people without invites. If done correctly and in an organized way, a viral effect can take root and just about everyone who wants an invite can get one quickly. We started building the product. But today we found a service that does exactly what we were thinking of building – InviteShare. This is a fairly simple service, but it does the job perfectly. Go to the site and register. Then browse the various private betas that are being serviced – pownce, spock, myskitch, mint, etc. – some of these I haven’t even been able to get into. If you have invitations, invite the people on the top of the list and confirm that you’ve invited them by clicking on their name. If you need an invite, add your name to the list. People who send out more invitations get priority on the lists, so there is an incentive to participate. And in a nice touch, email addresses are shown in images, making it much more difficult for spam bots to grab the names. → Read More