Card on Google's Invitation Only Advertising

Jupiter's David Card has a post, in classic pithy-Card style, on Google and Nike's Joga site. He calls it "invitation only advertising". That's great. Pretty clearly, this is not a broadcast model when one needs to be invited to marketing. But, naturally this makes sense. Google has realized with Gmail that reserving access increases scarcity, which increases perceived value.

The question, of course, is whether this social network experiment goes the way of MySpace or the way of Friendster. That is: will the traffic be sustained? They are heading the right direction, for sure, by prepopulating the site with people you want to be connected to (if you're a fan, that is): soccer players as well as Nike employees.