Charles Miller explains why Gmail’s system of handing out invitations is a good way to carefully scale up the system’s capacity instead of just opening the floodgates to everyone at once. What I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that Gmail’s invitation system seems to be roughly modeled by Google’s earlier efforts with Orkut, the invitation-only social networking system. With Orkut you could invite as many people as you wanted, but there’s not nearly so much demand for Orkut as there is for Gmail.
Invitation only
Charles Miller explains why Gmail’s system of handing out invitations is a good way to carefully scale up the system’s capacity instead of just opening the floodgates to everyone at once. What I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that Gmail’s invitation system seems to be roughly modeled by Google’s earlier efforts with Orkut, the invitation-only social networking system. With Orkut you could invite as many people as you wanted, but there’s not nearly so much demand for Orkut as there is for Gmail.
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