It’s All About Community

Web2.0 seems to be a lot about invite-only betas. We hear about them through a vari­ety of media and we patiently wait and often sal­iv­ate. We sign up to receive invites or even just sign up to be noti­fied when a ser­vice becomes more mature. Invites cre­ate a buzz and cer­tainly the whole GMail launch strategy made an art out of this mar­ket­ing strategy. I will admit to being a vic­tim of much mar­ket­ing. I like my toys. There’s a new ser­vice that I stumbled across the other day that allows you to ask for, receive and then share invites to these sac­red sites: Mash­able Invites.
I have been using the ser­vice for a couple days and have been amazed at how fast oth­ers share thier invites with you. Its a cool concept. I like get­ting and I like shar­ing. This thing actu­ally works. What is par­tic­u­larly import­ant about this pro­cess is that it works. Its built on com­munity and shar­ing and people do just that. Its one more quick response to changes being made in cyber­space.
Its simple to use. You cre­ate an account. You can browse through the list of sites that that are being tracked. if one interests you, you simply ask for an invite. Your email is added to a list of people request­ing invites. Shortly you will dis­cover that someone has sent you an invite. You can join the beta site. The idea now is that you should return the favour and and go back and send invit­a­tions to the top emails on the list. If you send invites and people con­firm receiv­ing them, you will dis­cover that your name is raised up the list next time you request an invite. You are rewar­ded for return­ing favours. That’s what the site is all about.
So if you are hanker­ing for an invite to that hot new site…check it out.
Oh, and one more thing…(yeah it was a Steve Jobs key­note day) it’s really handy to be able to sub­scribe via RSS to a feed of the site and you’ll be informed when new sites are added to the invite list.