September 01, 2004

Gmail invites for sale on Ebay

Posted at 12:17 | | 3 Comments | View blog reactions

Just realized people sell their free gmail invites on Ebay... You can buy one immediately for $9... If I was in the Gmail team, I would not like that very much but the buzz keeps building around it.

The buzz was even worse a while ago. Browsing through the archives of several internet forums shows that the price level was in the relatively high double-digit figures and people exchanged thousands of things for the invitation to GMail.

If I was in the GMail team I'd adjust the buzz by regulating the number of invites they send out - which is actually what they do. There is nothing wrong about selling invitations, at least as far as I can tell. If you have a good, even though it is not physical, and there is no clause in the GMail Terms of Service preventing the sale of it, I label it 'perfectly legal'.

Mario, September 01, 2004 at 17:39

Mario, Google explicitely prohibits it: "[U]sers may not: [...] Sell, trade, resell or otherwise exploit for any unauthorized commercial purpose or transfer any Gmail account" (taken from http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/program_policies.html).

It is viral marketing indeed, but Google wants (and is right) to control its flow.

Ludovic Copéré, September 01, 2004 at 22:40

Google explicitly prohibits transferring *accounts*, not invites. This is what most people have concluded about that part of the policy.

Chris Barna, September 02, 2004 at 01:31

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Welcome to my blog. Based in San Francisco, I am an entrepreneur and a blogger. I just started my fifth startup, Seesmic, a community driven video social software. Here is what TechCrunch says about it.

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