Churning the rumor mill a little here...
Google is interested in social networking. After being spurned by Friendster, they launched Orkut. And there's no doubt a company founded by mathemeticians loves to quantify relationships, from page rank and link analysis to how people interact.
Possibly the ultimate datum to quantify is the viral-like spread of a good thing. To do so would require something so over the top, so cool, so tantalizing it's practically irresistable. Enter GMail. Limited to 1000 users, and more added by invite only, it's the perfect scenario for social epidemiology. With its gig of storage and clean interface, it's so over the top, and so rare, and by invitation only--so elitist, what's not to crave?
Think about it. Are they in this to sell ads? Or to quantify? Or both?
In the end, why would Google care how invites were spread? Because bids and such taint the data. They need totally organic spread for clean analysis.
Maybe it's just a late night on Sudafed.
It appears that one of the characteristics of an agile developer is that you can use FLA (four or five letter acronynms), rather than the TLAs the rest of us use.
What do 'SCRUM' and 'CRUD' mean?