Facebook Invites Get Restricted, Developers Cry
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 29th, 2008 9:00 AMLast night Facebook finally turned on the invite restrictions that they have been speaking about for the past few weeks. I went and checked out a few of my apps all of which had now been limited to 12 invites per day. This drastic decrease in invitation limits is strangling the virality of applications and may soon kill much of what attracted developers to Facebook: the ability to quickly grab a large user base.
Without investing in advertising campaigns, new applications will find it increasingly difficult to experience much growth at all. Facebook argues that good applications will naturally spread and will in turn be rewarded. That nobody has come forward and suggested that their application has invite limits greater than 12 may suggest that there are no applications that have effectively leveraged the social graph.
One of two things will occur: (1) Facebook will end up killing all the virality of applications, or (2) better applications will begin to launch that offer users much more value and enable significant viral opportunity. The real test at this point is to find the first application that succeeds at this. Additionally, it would be great if Facebook provides developers with a little bit of advice on how to best optimize for the platform.
Has your app been placed in a good bucket? Have you seen any highly effective applications that enable you to invite more than 12 people at a time?
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Maybe a push for Social Ads is part of this? (Doubt that's the main driver, though--I imagine they genuinely were trying to improve the experience as app spam speeds up Facebook fatigue).
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Jason
apps.facebook.com/we_r_related
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Limiting invites which are user generated is odd. Basically Facebook is telling users (not application) that they can not do something as basic as sharing something with their friends... I mean is that not what social networking is all about? Perhaps instead of limiting what users and can do Facebook should think of improving invitation relevance... one though could be to rank invitation from people who are more relevant in ones life, though I am sure there are other options.
I feel that with this one Facebook is really punishing the wrong group...
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