TechCrunch owned Inviteshare is a great concept to help spread invites, but it does nothing to make the overall invite process simpler or help me get invites to the people I want to have them the most.  Here’s a quick list of features that would make my life easier:

• Why the crap isn’t this a social network?

  Rather than trusting the participation of strangers to determine who gets my next invite, I want to make sure my network of friends has access first.  Yes, this will make the service less fair since invites will be distributed through the popular cliques first.  But since those are the people I’ll want to use these new services with anyway, the overall experience to actually experience what the site is like will be more realistic, which means better feedback for the companies involved.

• Speaking of social networks, just make it work with Facebook

  My friend network is already in Facebook, so don’t make me create another one.  Facebook also has existing infrastructure to make it easy to see what betas are becoming popular among your friends. 

• Help me track what I’m participating in

  I have a folder in Outlook dedicated to confirmation emails for services I’ve signed up for, which is where I currently start to see which websites to visit to check what I currently may or may not still have invites to.  When I first sign up for something, I’d love to be able to tell InviteShare how many invites I’m given so I only have to scan one page to see what’s in my account.

• Blog widgets

  Admit it, twittering that you have invites to the latest exclusive beta du jour is a status symbol.  Why not enable users to show off what they have available?  One-click invite requesting through the widgets adds value for both blogger and reader as well since it would mark the end of combing through and decoding scrambled email addresses left in comments.

• Make sending invites easier

  Going through InviteShare actually adds a layer of complexity to the invite distribution process since all email addresses are displayed as images.  This is important to prevent harvesting by spammers, but I want to define a list of people I trust to at least have plain text or click to copy access to my email address.  If you had many friends with emails like sh4v3nw00ki3@obnoxiousdomain.com, you’d appreciate this functionality, too.

• RSS feeds for the tumbleloggers

  InviteShare already has big, pretty logos for all the companies in the service…put this in a feed that updates every time I join a new beta and I would be a happy girl indeed.

• Ratings and reviews

  Is the beta you’re interested in worthy of all the attention it’s getting, or is it just a slow news day?  Let users rate the services to help determine if it’s even worth their time to get on the list.

• Get widespread buy-in

  Once companies see how much of a value add these social features are to the invite process, it would be an easy sell to establish partnerships to integrate the process even further.  This could be accomplished without too much pain by extending the existing invite code system (note: this is where someone like Dave steps in to figure out the necessary APIs and architecture).

If InviteShare (or whoever takes this free advice) implements any of this functionality, they’ll be sitting on a marketing opportunity better than gold.  And I damn well better have an invite to the beta.