because i'm an "active blogger user", i have a free invitation to gmail (i guess passive users don't get invites). i didn't think much of it until i realized this morning that gmail is still relatively exclusive (not open to the public; you need an invitation to get an account) & in high demand... apparently these invites go for $40 and up on ebay.

so i've been browsing a site called gmail swap, where you can barter away your gmail invitations to people who want them. those who are looking for invitations will post a solicitation listing what they will give you, do for you, etc. if you hook them up. unfortunately that requires leafing through a lot of crap... i haven't seen very many interesting offers, & the good ones are snapped up extremely quickly (within mere minutes sometimes). but i still reload the page faily often to keep up with new offers. hopefully i'll be able to catch one where someone sends me a cd of some unusual foreign music or a strange magazine to cut up, or something along those lines... but we'll see.

the worst is the people who say they have nothing to offer... come on people, if you spent 30 seconds looking at the site, you would see that very few people are offering anything of any real cash value (& the ones who are probably are scammers). they're offering curiosities, exotica, kind gestures, and so on... & if you can't think of something then you clearly don't deserve a gmail invite. i mean, these people are getting invitiations for offering up silly jpegs that they've downloaded from the net, or simple snapshots of their pets or their hometown. if you don't even have that much to offer, i have to wonder whether you even exist.

(note: if anyone wants to directly offer me something for my gmail invitation, i'm very open to suggestion.)