Forced Invites are Officially Dead on Facebook!
Published by Rodney Rumford February 13th, 2008 in Facebook, Facebook Applications.
BREAKING NEWS: Forced invites are officially dead on facebook! I can hear the collective community of 63 million active users rejoicing. This is something that they have been clamoring for a while about. People felt that applications were being spammy if they forced invites. Actually developers were employing a very specific tactic and leveraging a “loophole” to gain users. Nothing wrong with that in most cases. Many users however had a very different opinion.
There have been several popular groups that chastised apps for this forced invites behavior (No I will not invite 20 friends just to use your application). In fact I started a group 2 days ago to raise awareness of good apps that do not force invites here. Group: “Say YES to great apps that don’t force invites”
I don’t have an issue with facebook making this change at all. I am for it; it will make apps more useful in the future. It only raises the bar for great apps and eliminates the invite noise that they felt was detrimental to the user community.
Here is where I do have an issue: Do not send email to the developer community and blindside them with something that is called a VIOLATION. In fact there is no policy whatsoever that mentions that this can’t be done.
So it is NOT a violation. Facebook really needs to get their act together and learn how to communicate in a PROACTIVE manner with their developer community before they make these sorts of changes on the fly. I am sure the large percentage of developers would comply if they are given a reasonable 5-7 day notice that they no longer want this to be allowed. Facebook needs to treat their developer community with a little more respect and effective communication. (let’s not forget who built the 16,000 apps for free for them). 
So developers get blindsided with an email if their app forces invites that read like this at 7:59pm pacific time tonight. Not Cool.
Invites Violation
Dear developer,
Your application has been temporarily restricted from using requests/invites. This is because users of your application get trapped in a UI interaction for inviting friends.
If the user clicks the Facebook-rendered buttons “Skip”, “Cancel”, or “Skip This Step”, he must not be re-presented with an invite friends UI unless he explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option. If you use another UI that does not have one of these buttons rendered by Facebook, the application must offer some other navigation option to leave the invite friends process, and the user must not be re-presented with an invite friends UI unless he explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option.
If you correct this aspect of your application, the moratorium will be lifted. Please respond to this email once you have made the necessary changes and please include your application id for verification purposes.
If you wish to correspond, please reply to this message.
Thank you,
Facebook Platform Developer Operations & Support
p.s. They turned off “violating” apps invite pages. Facebook better enforce compliance to ALL and EVERY application immediately that forces invites. Actually this is moving towards a trend that I foresee for facebook: users will not have to even install your application in order to use it (this will apply to all apps eventually). It is coming in the very near future. Mark my words.
Do me a favor and DIGG this, thanks
Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook news
10 Responses to “Forced Invites are Officially Dead on Facebook!”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 13th, 2008 at 7:53 am
- 2 Pingback on Feb 13th, 2008 at 11:56 am
- 3 Pingback on Feb 13th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Does this apply to quiz apps that require the user to invite friends to see results? One way around this would be to allow them to skip the invite page (thus complying with FB rules), however still force users to invite 20 friends to see quiz results.
I’m sure we will see some creative responses from deevlopers to keep some form of the forced invite alive within FB’s rules.
so forced invites are no more? well if that’s true then someone should tell the application developers.
just now i tried the application “what’s your biggest turn on?” and after filling out questions they refused to show me the results.
the message I got was
“TO VIEW YOUR RESULTS, YOU MUST INVITE AT LEAST 20 FRIENDS.”
so i deleted and blocked that application.
Personally I don’t think this “blind-sides” anyone. The wording is very specific. It doesn’t target apps that prompt people to invite their friends once … only the ones that nag people to invite their friends over and over again even when they’ve hit the skip button once already. Many users falter at that stage and don’t even notice there is a skip button, so apps still have quite a good chance of getting their invites sent out.
To be honest, if application developers don’t recognise themselves that prompting a user to invite their friends over and over again even when the user has already clicked “skip” is some kind of application-sharp-practice then they need to get a clue and wise up to the fact that they will only build successful apps if they produce something users genuinely want - not by coercion or with some bizarre idea that they are “owed” invites because anything less is a failure to “support” them.
I guess this means the developers of Send Hotness, etc. are going to have to focus on making apps with rich content that drives viratily, rather than a use-flow that forces it. Sounds exciting ^^
This new change only creates apps that provide output/results/usability after invites have been sent. Hence, no real change.
The developers of the apps probably get advertising money every time someone even takes a peek at the app. So the apps don’t have to be popular. It’s enough that they get people to take a look at them (before blocking them). Very few people will take a second look at “What [add any word] are you?”-type of app a second time in any case.
I think the invite feature should be completely separated from the app itself so that invites are sent through a channel not in contact with the app. Hence, the app cannot know whether or not the user has recommended it to someone. This would make the recommendations credible.
I think you´re wrong on this one Rodney… FB didn´t blind sight anyone and force invites are not new… I would even say the invite tool provided by FB (which was released about 3 months after platform launch) was developed to prevent users from doing this kind of thing specifically… This people knew what they were doing was not the intended use for the tool… I have 0 sympathy
Definitely a great move from Facebook.