e-notes

Thanks to isnoop we now have, in its raw outlines, a fascinating case study of the stellar rise and sudden demise of the first and most prominent GMail invites spooler service. Following Google's viral launch of their 1GB free but P2P invitation only webmail on 1 April 2004, invites began trading on eBay for $100 and more. This bubble burst eventually, but triggered a happy but transaction cost intensive passing on of invites in discussion boards by kind enough people to part with their invites for free, who responded to posts crying out for a free invite.

Isnoop realised the obvious: toil and trouble of exchanging posts back and forth, sometimes across several time zones, could be saved by matching supply with demand in a more efficient way. He set up a donations site providing a common email address to which surplus invites could be sent. The site would store the invites in a database and release on a first-come first-serve basis to those queuing up for a free invite.

Eventually, supply significantly outstripped demand, following Google's relaxation of an initially very tight grip on the network economies of the P2P invites distribution. As a result, the redistribution became open to abuse, allowing potential spammers to register vast multiples of GMail accounts. This prompted Goggle to persuade isnoop to discontinue the spooler, and with it a lucrative online ad space operation, in summer 2005.

Today, invites trade on eBay for free, although there are still a number of redistribution sites open, mostly in languages other than English, which appears to be a rather effective way to escape Google's peering eye. They have adopted slightly more complex redistribution methods compared to isnoop's original site, no doubt at least in part to make detection of coordinated redistribution more difficult for Google. Similar to the Napster to Kazaa paradigm shift, they restrict themselves to channelling email addresses of requesting parties to donors directly.

Posted at : May 16th, 2006 - 4:36 pm
Filed under : Notes
Navigate : Previous post / Next post