Historically as a webmaster it’s been inefficient dealing with the invite-only system many of these new websites are employing.

You write about a service that’s in invite-only status and have a few invites to pass around. After your friends and family what do you do with the leftover invites? If you post that you have invites on your blog then inevitably the comments area will fill up with people stopping by and saying they want one. That’s cool, that’s the web working.

But.

Most of these people from my experience only stop by for the invite and then are seen nevermore. In one case the number of “send me an invite” comments after it was stated several times the invites were gone got so bad that comments needed to be closed altogether. I love sharing and that makes up a great part of this blog, but having to tell people who stop by so briefly that they can’t even read the post and comments that we don’t have any more invites to share is a time waster for both of us. More importantly, it puts the burden of distributing and thus promoting a site on the webmaster, not on the site/service. At least if a site is going to make us part of their marketing department, they could make it an affiliate program and pay us for the work.

The existing process makes me feel like we’re being used.

Some people might not have a problem feeling or being used, but I do. Frankly, my enthusiasm in a new website / service wanes considerably these days if it’s setup as an invite-only deal. I’m not talking about private invite-only situations, I’m talking about public invite only distributions. I realize there are some legitimate reasons a site might want to go invite-only, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in too many cases. I’ve seen a disturbing trend develop, what about you?

This morning Thatedeguy was first to tip me off to the service InviteShare, followed by TechCrunch. That’s just the order of how the posts came in my RSS reader but maybe Techcrunch was first. I gave them both links for writing about the topic, but no link for InviteShare after I learned that they are already trying to auction away their site on Sitepoint (picture above). A number of TechCrunch commenters are annoyed as well. What’s the deal, guys, are you just using Techcrunch (and other bloggers) to pump up the sale price of your service and then dump on the highest bidder?

After seeing this, I don’t care how useful this service is or isn’t, this gives me a very sour taste in my mouth.

If you’re site/service is so new that it’s in invite-only, why are you auctioning your site? Or even thinking about selling your site, if that’s the story here? You haven’t even launched yet. I’m surprised that Arrington hasn’t updated his post to point out the site is trying to pimp itself and using a “front page listing on TechCrunch” to increase its value. Talk about leading your readers down a potential dark path, Mike. Shane does tell his readers that it can be bought in a “by the way…” at the post end but doesn’t seem to have any problem with this concept. I can understand being duped and writing a post about the site before you learned these details, but now that you know what they are doing at least update your posts and make readers aware of this important sidestory and how you feel about what this means for how your reader’s information might be used.

Unless of course you want your readers to sign up for something and then have their emails sold to the highest bidder. I’m not saying InviteShare are spammers or intend to do anything nefarious with your information, but that doesn’t mean whomever buys their service won’t be. A lot of ifs, ands and buts here, but I’ve been around the web too long not to be more cynical than the average bear. Just what we all need, more spam.

Unless InviteShare drops the auction and plans to be around a month from now, I’ll continue searching for a service without baggage like this to better deal with the invite situation, which I still believe is a scheme in and of itself, no thanks to Google and others.

Update July 21, 2007 5:02pm PST: TechCrunch ended up buying InviteShare in the auction for (the rumored?) price of $25,000. So they contributed to making the price even more expensive, Mike admits. At least TechCrunch won’t be putting this one up on the auction block write away and it already has more buzz than Edgeio.

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