invitations

Woopra To Close Beta Registrations

A post published by John P. over on the Woopra blog is stating that Woopra will be shutting down beta registrations once they reach 50,000 monitored websites. As of October 8th, Woopra was monitoring 45,000 websites. Once registration is closed, there is a possibility that the media will blow in response but John gives a series of explanations as to the reasoning behind the move.

  • A 50,000 site “beta” is certainly a big enough sample to work through bugs and take suggestions.
  • We have a number of projects underway that we need to turn our attentions to temporarily and this will allow us to focus on core improvements as opposed to continual expansion.
  • We continue to hear from the community that you’d like more personalized attention, and pausing the site additions will ensure against further dilution of our current limited resources.

Once the Woopra team gets their ducks in a row, they will replace their site approval system with a personal invitation system in which current Woopra users will be able to send invitations to friends and family. Woopra was unofficially announced back at WordCamp Dallas about six months ago and since then, the sky has been the limit for the amount of success and growth that Woopra has experienced. Keep it up John!

Would You Pay For An Invite?

In a recent post, I described a conversation I had with my father concerning invitations and if there was a business opportunity in the making by perhaps, selling these invitations. Here is what was discussed.

I asked my dad if he thought that perhaps, there would be some sort of business opportunity surrounding invitations to these new services. Allow people to bid on an invite or pay a low price. My father responded by saying “people won’t pay for something that is free, or that they could obtain by some other means.”

Turns out, my father was wrong. While browsing around on Ebay, I came across a few auctions in which the item being sold was an invitation to GrandCentral, the new service which was acquired by Google. Here is a link to an auction that has already ended as you can see, there are other auctions taking place, asking for as much as $10.00 for the invitation.

Now I can’t wait to tell my dad that people are willing to pay money for something that really has no monetary value. Would you be willing to pay for an invite?