I think both Facebook and app developers should stay away from forcing users one way or the other. App developers should not force users to send requests to their friends and Facebook should not constrain what users can do with their friends. Facebook has already made changes that apps can send requests only using the friend selector (so the control is with the user not app) – now they should remove the constrain on how many friends they want to interact with. Clearly, users have to be careful about not spamming their own friends – else they won’t be friends anymore.

For a startup like ours, it has been a significant bump on the road. Users could put birthdays of up to 20 of their friends on their social calendar at a time (which itself is bad for the user) – now that number has gone down to 12. In theory users can come back the next day, but in practice, we find it not to be the case with most users.

Again coming back to the email metaphor, the bad actors are junk mailers (not possible in Facebook because requests must be made by the user by his own actions) or apps who force you to invite certain number of people (against the policy now – can be easily verified and app can be warned), but this ill-designed “quota system” is as bad as email programs telling people how many emails they can send to their friends.

Raj Lalwani
http://www.socialcalendar.com/
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=8331309681

Recently, Facebook’s changes to invitations have sparked some interesting points (mainly that Facebook is punishing developers). We’ve already said that Facebook is doing what Ben Bernanke should- curbing inflation for the sake of platform&…