Should Facebook Ban All Application Friend Invitations

Browsing Facebook, as I’m prone to do 🙂 . I found a group called ‘Official Facebook Petition: To Ban The inviting Of Friends On Applications’.

With over 267,000 members gathered over a short period of time, it looks like it has hit a nerve with Facebook friends.

I didn’t join the group though, because:

• Good applications add to the Facebook experience. If people aren’t able to invite friends, the experience will suffer, and the site will go downhill.
• Invitations to add an application are just that, invitations, which you can choose to accept or decline. Banning applications removes freedom of choice.
• Inviting friends to applications helps to build a user base, which in turn helps developers to improve their product with feedback from users.
• Unless you go browsing applications on a regular basis, you simply won’t know what is available. Having friends send invitations can uncover some really helpful, and/or fun applications.

The problem that I have had in the past has mainly been with applications that force people to invite friends before they can use the application.

I understand that applications need to reach a ‘tipping point’, from which they then grow virally. Using forced invitations can increase usage by up to 1000%, which is a pretty big number to increase your userbase by!

There is little wonder then that forced invites have had a surge in popularity among developers.

Problems occur when developers continually force invitations to poor quality applications, with less regard to engagement, or retaining users, than gaining new ones.

This causes a constant turnover of users.

I recently co founded a Facebook called Say Yes To Great Apps That Don’t Force Invites!

The purpose of the group is to publicise applications on Facebook that don’t force users to send invitations, and that offer some value.

Although in one sense the group is now redundant because Facebook looks set to ban forced invitations, the vision of the group is to review and promote good qulity applications.

It’s an open group and any one can join.

The key to any social networking site is th word ‘social’.

Bugging people with spam or useless stuff all the time is one way to lose Facebook friends.

Or any other friends as well, for that matter!

My Disclaimer:

I do not claim to speak on the behalf of Facebook in any sense, and am far from being an expert on Social Networking.

For questions regarding policies and so on, I recommend reading the terms and conditions before contacting Facebook.

I’d love to meet you on Facebook.

Please feel free to add me as a friend.

To view my Facebook profile, simply click on my profile badge to the left!