Facebook Friend Invite Death Watch
Published by Rodney Rumford February 29th, 2008 in Facebook, Facebook Applications.
Facebook Application Friend Invites are Quickly Dying Off:
Facebook has finally made live the sliding scale invites limitations mechanism for applications. Applications are now subject to daily changing (not fun) friend invite (and notifications) limits for their applications based upon several factors.
We blogged about this change a while back. Some applications will actually be effectively choked to death and not be able to allow invites (this is not universally a bad thing) based upon user acceptance of the invite accept percentage.
“Based on the affinity users show for your application’s use of Facebook Platform through their interactions, your application is allocated certain abilities and limits…”
Metrics: Response Rates. One could ascertain that users largely ignore invites as only 10-15% acceptance rates are numbers that we are seeing across multiple non spammy apps.
Metrics: Friend Invite Allocations
This is yet another example of how facebook continually evolves and makes changes to how apps can contact users. The main problem that I see here is that app owners can’t really control users behaviors (invites and acceptances). Consequently more apps are getting squeezed down. There should eventually be a leveling to this and you will be able to have higher quality invites. This theoretically should increase acceptance rates; which would then open up a higher level of invites.
It would REALLY help developers if they could see the percentages of response metrics and how that directly ties to bucket numbers and invite allocation numbers. This could help them optimize the invite process & logic so that the response rates are higher. This is what facebook is trying to do here. So they should take it to the next level and give developers the visibility to 1 layer deeper.
The real challenge here is that the apps constantly live in a state of flux. I published an article a while back that this is all a trend, and that facebook is trying to make it eventually so that apps do not have to invite users at all and apps will be visible without having to actually install them. As I have said previously; the ecosystem rules sets for apps in facebook are becoming as complex as the tax code.
The easy way to see how an app is effected by this is to go to the invite page of an app and click on friends until it says you have hit the limit. So have some fun and come join the Facebook Friend Invite Death Watch. 
4 Responses to “Facebook Friend Invite Death Watch”
- 1 Trackback on Mar 1st, 2008 at 11:46 am
- 2 Pingback on May 20th, 2008 at 5:20 am
Rodney, we’re seeing our traffic and invites cut completely in half by this change! Its not the Facebook Friend Invite Death Watch, its the Facebook Platform Death Watch.
I fully agree with the sentiment of the article as well as the comment “Sad Developer”. We, at SocialCalendar.com, made a strategic decision of leading with a Facebook app instead of other options but we find that the Facebook rules are completely arbitrary, draconian and not even good for their own users - let alone app developers like us. It’s like Outlook or Gmail telling users the maximum number of emails they can send to their friends!
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