TechCrunch Buys InviteShare

Paul Glazowski,

on July 19, 2007,

Profy correspondent Cyndy Aleo-Carreira was right on when she told of how fantastic InviteShare was - in Michael Arrington’s view. So fantastic, apparently, that he’s gone ahead and made it his own.

That’s right. The service that could very well turn out to be much more of a hindrance in the beta sphere than an aid is now under the Crunch cloud. According to Mr Arrington himself, he’ll be using it to disseminate access keys and codes to his community. His very, very large community.

Wonderful, a massively popular tech blog is going to offer its readers (of which there are many) even easier access to the expanding crop of invite-only creations on the Web. A pileup waiting to happen, wouldn’t you say?

Certainly, it’s doubtful that Arrington & Co consciously wish to wreak havoc with InviteShare. (I suspect a name change is in the works. Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion that Cyndy’s “MetaBeta” submission likely won’t be the last label standing.) That would bring the Crunch network awful karma, and they probably don’t want that.

But it appears that havoc is inevitable.

Ideally, the product would work well for everybody, but you know, Cyndy knows, and I know that real and ideal are rarely, if ever, synonymous, whether on the Web or not. More often they diverge, sometimes greatly. That means some make out wonderfully, while most end up grappling with the short end of the stick. When the disappointed majority runs well into the thousands, you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster.

I’m talking to you, Arrington, specifically. So be careful there. You screw this up and lots and lots of people will be peeved. Not to mention the folks who’ve created and continue to create new products they wish put out for beta testing before they announce any official grand openings. The traditional invitation system has worked out pretty well thus far. To break that would be, well, not good. Not good at all.

That about wraps this up. All we’ve left to do is wait and see what happens. If you’re a fan of InviteShare, may we suggest using it to get access to sites which interesting you now? There’s bound to be an influx of attention reaped on the service in the weeks ahead, at which point you may not have such great luck gaining access to various places as you do today.

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8 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - July 19, 2007 at 08:06 am PDT

I often wonder if he’s clinically insane. Every so often something like this happens and I’m sure of it.

I’m seeing more and more sites ditching the Gmail Get-an-Invite-Give-Invites mentality. This should finish it off, as well as annoy a LOT of people.
Paul Glazowski - July 19, 2007 at 08:38 am PDT

I think he’s gotten “too big for his britches”, to be honest.
Paul Glazowski - July 19, 2007 at 08:46 am PDT

A somewhat unrelated addendum: I’m glad that a tech blog can be as successful as his, but I think it should be backed by a great measure of substance, and it seems like there’s little substance to be found at TechCrunch today. If anything, the non-Arrington-authored posts are the best of the day, which is hardly a good sign. Something tells me the site’s going to fizzle in the next year or so, unless it really shapes up.

I recently read a piece on Mike at Wired, and I gotta wonder, for a guy who’s invested so much time into something, I would’ve thought it’d be a little, you know, better.

Then again, if it’s bad, that means there’s still room for good. And that’s where Profy comes in. (A shameless plug on the very site being plugged. Awesomeness.)
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - July 19, 2007 at 03:19 pm PDT

For me, it’s not so much an us vs. them (I still read them daily in my feeds) as a seeming knee-jerk decision sort of thing. There’s no foresight involved, and the lawsuit was a perfect example; there are ways to report something controversial while keeping your company out of the muck, and I don’t see it. I also REALLY don’t see InviteShare as having long-term viability; after all, it’s really a sort of pyramid scheme, and you are never going to have enough invites to please all of the people. Then again, I could be wrong; I never thought anyone would bother watching Survivor.
Svetlana Gladkova - July 19, 2007 at 08:38 pm PDT

Wow, I like your comments Cyndy and Paul, pleasant morning surprise to know you are so confident of our future with Profy

But anyway, I don’t think I am really afraid of the InviteShare since I guess all the services will be able to choose a way to give away their invites and some of them will still preserve the usual contact forms of their websites. Besides, more often than not we get invites directly by email because startups are usually interested in getting as much coverage as possible, not a single post on TechCrunch to be read by TechCrunch readers only and tried out by TechCrunch readers only. They want many blogs, many links and many friends in the blogosphere. Thus I still believe we will be getting our invites same as we do now.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - July 19, 2007 at 10:24 pm PDT

Oh, I’m not afraid of it at all; I think that they will put themselves out of business.

You are right in that most companies feel the more coverage the better. The difference will be that the current invite structure will change; Gmail was the model that was followed for a long time, where you got an invite, and then received a certain number of invites to give to friends. I’m seeing more sites move to a model where you have to contact them directly, or get an invite from someplace like Profy or TechCrunch, but then you don’t get more to share.

The whole concept of InviteShare seems very social in nature, but really is about reducing the buzz that companies try to generate with the invite-only private beta.
Svetlana Gladkova - July 19, 2007 at 11:11 pm PDT

Cyndy, sure the current invite status will change though I’m not sure any startup will actually benefit from all the same people (TC readers and InviteShare users) will get invites to all new products and services. I really doubt these people will all actually use all the services. And as a result the betas won’t actually get the feedback they need. It is a strange service and it looks like TechCrunch wants to monopolize all the invites to all the startups. Distribution of invites is already getting ugly at times and it will get even worse, I think.
Paul Glazowski - July 20, 2007 at 12:58 pm PDT

That’s right, InviteShare, as silly or as cool as one might think the service was as an autonomous creation, now that it’s under TechCrunch, it’s actually going to be kind of interesting to see what happens to it.

If InviteShare was to be the place to go to find the newest betas and test them out, something else may now have to fill that void if creators of beta products are to disseminate invites in an unbiased fashion (it will be biased if they choose to stick with InviteShare under the Techcrunch brand).

On the one hand, the fact that something like InviteShare is even in existence is kind of unfortunate, but on the other, it’s out there already.

Oh well, we’ll just have to see what happens, I suppose.

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