No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Yesterday morning I posted about Xobni, a new outlook plugin that brings the concepts of social networks to email to improve productivity. It’s a cool product and so far I am loving it.

The founders were kind enough to give me 25 invites which I offered first come first serve in my blog post. I quickly got 25 requests (in less than 2 hours). So I asked for more and got another 10. Xobni really wants to keep their beta small until they work the kinks out.

So yesterday evening, I sorted through all the emails and found the first 35 requests. I sent each person an email giving them the code and asking them not to share because I only had 35.

Sure enough, several of the people I gave invite codes to were not able to use them because by the time they tried it, the limit had been reached. I know I only gave out 35.

So one ore more of the people I gave the invite code to didn’t play by the rules. I guess I should have expected that but it still frosts me.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Stephe Wilks

    Fred, I’m hopeful that your cyncism is misplaced… perhaps folks logged in, and lost the session before they completed and tried again, or the counter was incorrectly re-set at Xobni, or… (hopefully, lots of other “ors” which do not mean we should all lose faith in the human race! And, no, I don’t recommend a specific analysis of the IP records to prove this correct or not, because its more fun believing the world is a good place!).As one of the lucky folk, I can see value in Xobni (and am enjoying the hunt for the top 10!), but have already hit a (fairly obvious, but not until you use it) limitation in my implementation – I tend to rabidly delete incoming mail (archiving specific stuff of value on a very limited basis, mainly off line), but keep outgoing (until standard Outlook archiving takes it out after six months) – so to Xobni I appear to have greatly inflated “out” vs “in” mail, and limited analytical evidence of half the conversation (the incoming mail that is not kept)… WIll be interesting to see how that affects my experience of the product. Stephe

  2. simon

    here here .. dam thetans.

  3. Tim Dierks

    I fail to understand. They gave you a single code that was good for 25 people to sign up, so people could use it more than once? Who does invites that way? Why didn’t they give you 25 codes, each one good exactly once?

  4. jackson

    Anonymity is the fatal flaw of the web. Don’t trust anyone.

  5. akhilsharma

    you and me and invite and i posted it on /b/. what what!