Elliot Lee

There’s a new product released today by someone named Norman Freeman. It’s called ViralInviter, and it looks very clever. I’ve had this idea for a long time, but I haven’t yet seen any decent implementations of it. The idea is that your visitors can invite their friends to join your site with their email address books. Most people have nearly all of their contacts’ email addresses stored in a webmail service such as Gmail or Hotmail. By providing their login, you can automatically get their contact list and allow them to invite select people– or everyone– with a single click.

Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn have been doing this for a long time. I never invite people who were not already users of the service. The real value, in my opinion, comes when you can automatically send friend requests to everyone in your address book who already uses the service– whether it’s Facebook or something else. That’s really useful, because people you haven’t talked with in years might be on the service, and it might be the perfect way to reconnect. I hope ViralInviter has this feature. It does have a 100% money-back guarantee (so there’s no risk, if for any reason you don’t like it), and the price is going up tomorrow: so take a look today!

P.S. Another thing I’d like is the ability to export my contacts and then give my contact list to the website in question. This gives them only what I want to give them– the contact list’s email addresses– without giving them my password nor access to my email account. I know some services (like Facebook, I believe) didn’t allow this; yet others did. I think Plaxo is also a pioneer in this area. This is definitely something to keep an eye on.