How can I get Ingress invites?

Question

What's the easiest, fastest, surest way to score an Ingress invite, or is the signup at the Niantic site the best bet?

Answer 1

Define an easy way, I know some people who just sign up for an invite at Niantic Labs and got their invite. As far as I know they constantly send new invites through several channels, and as the game gets massive, I guess the number of sing up invites sent will only get bigger.

It is also a lot of fun to make a fuzz :)

Update: There are several ways to get an invite to ingress:

1. Promote ingress in G+ or your personal blog (make it creative and fun), send a link to +Niantic Project and +Brandon Badger - this method worked pretty well before
2. Follow ingress and niantic labs twitter, e.g. @IngressNews, they give out invites regularly, sometimes they make trivia contests in irc, or refer to other sources like podcasts where some invites are given away - a fast way to get an invite but quite unreliable (you have to win the contest)
3. Sign up for an invite at Niantic Labs
4. Have a friend at google or niantic lab

Answer 2

In order of speed to get an invite:

1. The easiest and fastest way, would be to have a friend at Google who can help you get on the internal signup list for invites (or if you know someone at Niantic Labs, they could probably just invite you directly).
2. Create some artwork or graphics related to Ingress and share that on G+ to #Ingress and #IngressInvite tags. This is probably the best way in general, and you don't need amazing photo editing skills, just a neat idea and pre-existing image are enough - see some of the submissions that got invited.
3. Sign up for the general waiting list at the website.

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Ingress Artwork

This seems to be a popular method to catch attention of the Ingress devs, so I will elaborate on it further.

Sharing the picture

Make sure you share it to the #ingress and #ingressinvite tag. Most people also specifically add some of the Ingress developers, Brandon Badger, Brian Rose etc. ... check the successful re-shared posts in #ingress who got the invite.

Artwork Features

This is just my observation of common traits in the accepted graphics, I don't know of a particular 'acceptance criteria' as it is basically a question of whether Niantic sees & likes it.

• Incorporate the Niantic, Enlightened or Resistance logos
• Could also use green or blue filters or coloring (reason: Enlightened faction is green and Resistance is blue in the Ingress UI)
• Using public domain or free license images and altering them seems to be ok
• Don't use images with people in them (portraits of historical figures seem fine). The only pic I see posted with a person, is a self-photo of the poster ... in general I expect Niantic will steer clear of model release issues.
• Clever stories about how Ingress has been around for a long time (by editing in the logo to ancient sites, famous art etc.) seem to be received favorably.

Answer 3

All of the tricks mentioned in above answers are what everyone says. But if you want to have the activation code faster, then you can try this method which worked for me.

The trick is to periodically check #Ingress and #Ingress-Invite for an Activation code. People generally share spare activation code there. I guessed this when I saw various old and already redeemed activation code there. So I just waited for few hours and Bingo!! I got the activation code.

Just to mention I bought my Android phone on 1st Jan and got the activation code on 5th Jan. Nothing else can be faster than that. ;-)