Thursday, July 19, 2007

TechCrunch Buys InviteShare

TechCrunch, the site for what some call alpha geeks (which in my head is the same as half-done nerds), has acquired InviteShare. InviteShare is a site where you can register yourself as wanting an invite for some "web 2.0" startup arrogant enough to think they can afford an invite system.

Examples of such companies are Pownce (a little-innovative pimped version of Twitter) and some others, I would check which, but, again, I get an "Error 500 - Internal server error" when I go to the website. I am repeating myself, but this likely due to the use of fetish software. And that's what you get when you don't pay: sucky webservers, which is exactly why I find this InviteShare a stupid idea. You share invites, you give them away for free essentially. Why would you do that? Well first of all why do you need an invite at all, I wonder. But given that you do, shouldn't you monetize these invites? That's what they did when Gmail just came out, you could actually buy Gmail invites on eBay. That's a model that I like much more than this InviteShare junk.

How much do you guess TechCrunch paid for InviteShare? I'm sure it never will pay itself back. There's no business plan there. It's about giving away stuff for free and it's for a niche market -- early adopting nerds.