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While I think InviteShare provides a useful service and could gather a community, I think it would be difficult for someone to easily make a full-time business out of it on its own.

$25,000 for what likely could have been a handful of days work is an excellent payout, and possibly a great way to fund their next startup ;]

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Unless I'm badly mistaken, that site's much more than just a handful of days work.

"Could be done in a handful of days" is the stock response to web applications these days. On one hand its mostly true (its easy to get the majority of functionality working), but its also a bit of bravado: raw functionality and a polished product are not really equivalent.

Well said. I was just pondering this the other day - how did did I manage to get really cool/hard coding projects (AI, systems, etc.) done in school in just under a week while it takes many months to get a decent web application built. I realized that it's because the things you build in school are prototypes that deal with very specific use cases, while web apps require you take care of lots and lots of details so that ordinary people could use them.

Please don't reply saying "maybe you should consider Ruby on Rails" because that's not the point of my comment :)

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