Techcrunch today announced the acquisition of InviteShare, a free online service where users can share and get invites to any website or service startup in private Alpha or Beta testing. Most new startups seed invitations to their family and friends who in turn can invite new accounts. To cash in on this, people start selling invites for a few dollars on auction sites such as ebay, famous examples being GMail, Joost and more recently Pownce. InviteShare aims to bypass this and allows users to freely share & acquire invites.

InviteShare already boasts of 42 different sites, 14,000 registered users and more than 15,000 invites being sent out and is a win-win situation for both webmasters and users.

If you have invitations, you can invite people on the top of the list and confirm that you’ve invited them by clicking on their name. If you need an invite, you can add your name to the list. People who send out more invitations get priority on the lists and get their names listed on the homepage.

Currently, the most popular invites seem to be for Pownce, Joost, 8apps, Moola and Spock.