How invite-only websites gain attention

A few weeks ago, the new social network Ello went viral. Everyone was going crazy about it. I was invited by a coworker, but was it really that special? I don’t think so. Sure, it’s cool, but everything that’s invite-only gains more attention than it would normally do.

It works

Yes, it works for sure. Many people are going to get excited and want to join instantly. Asking others if they have invitations left and telling others how great it is that they could join it before everyone else could. People tend to feel special about this, while it’s not really that special.

Why are you writing about this?

After Ello, I got really excited to make an invite-only library for PHP. Actually, it’s not invite-only, it’s open-source, but it’s a library to create these invite codes. Nice huh? So next time you want to launch your product, you better use that library!

The library itself

So, it’s a PHP library that has 3 lists with words. A list with boy names, girl names and the most used words in American English. With these lists, it’s able to create random word combinations. To make it safe(r) you can use a salt on the end. It adds a random character combination at the end of the code.

Usage

Usage of the library is pretty easy. Below I have some samples.

You can find the repository here.