The invite avalanche of Doostang.com

An amusing thing is happening around Doostang.com, a new entry in the online social networking space.

Setup recently by two guys, Mareza Larizadeh and Pavel Krapivin, the site has an invite only policy and seems to set itself the goal of being the best place to find or fill a job vacancy.

Now here's the thing: they make it so easy to invite the contacts you have from Linkedin, Plaxo, etc that within a few minutes on the site you can send out thousands of invitations.

Yesterday (I think they must have hit a tipping point in the last 48 hrs) I got about 50 invites coming through and so I thought it must be worth a look.

I had a peek, thought it looked professional and pretty low maintenance so I decided to invite my contacts on LinkedIn (3000+). I chose to do this as LinkedIn has become as much about jobs as it is about social networking nowadays so I thought it could be of interest to many of my contacts.

If you take a look at many of the LinkedIn Yahoo! groups at the moment there are a few complaints from people and the word "spam" is mentioned pretty frequently. Imagine if you're connected to 500+ people on Linkedin and they all decide, as I did, to share Doostang.com with their connections.

Some of the complaints are about multiple invites which I guess could be due to some Plaxo users have multiple email addresses, or someone inviting all their Plaxo and LinkedIn contacts at the same time.

I think the guys are having some fun holding the site together as it must be growing at a phenominal rate. There's a buzz in the recruiting world about this site. Maureen Sharib's recent blog gives you a bit more background on this. Or keep an eye on Doostang's own blog.

I know many of the people I invited have said they're experiencing problems logging in, etc.

I guess it'll settle down after a few days and then we can see if the site is actually worth being a member.

David Regler
Maine Associates Ltd

Technorati Tags - social networking, Doostang, LinkedIn, Plaxo