Inviteshare is/was a service that allowed people to share their private beta invites with other users in the Inviteshare network. It was a very useful service that I used often to get into private betas quickly and efficiently, as well as share my own invites. Techcrunch later acquired Inviteshare because it fit quite nicely with their overall goal to be the central place for start-up news. Since then everything seemed to go downhill for Inviteshare from that point on.
Inviteshare slowly became less and less relevant and slowed down on updating sites with private betas available. Soon enough services that were no longer in private beta were still featured on the site. Thinking that maybe things would get adjusted I left for a while hoping TC would get their act together. Today I headed over to Inviteshare to see if anything has changed and it has actually gotten worse. Some of the sites featured on the page either no longer exist, are in public beta, or have been acquired. Now granted, some more sites have been added to the database but finding these sites through all the muck gets to be a strenuous task.
The only new feature I saw was the community forums, which is a step backwards. Before Inviteshare I had to dig through forums to find private beta codes, a very annoying and tedious thing to do. Inviteshare was suppose to fix this problem, not further enable it. Sadly, they are not accomplishing this goal at all.
Inviteshare had great potential to grow right along with Techcrunch. This is especially true now more than ever with their powerful reach in the web start-up world where they are a dominating voice. Instead of sharing invites through the posts I wish they would do all the beta invites through Inviteshare, or at least strike deals with these start-ups to go through Inviteshare. Techcrunch has a gold mine of traffic that they are currenlty just sitting on. Private beta nuts would flock over to Inviteshare in mass numbers to increase their chances of getting the shiniest new web toy on the market.
Techcrunch, please fulfill my curiousity and tell me one thing, what happened to my beloved Inviteshare and will it ever be great again?
