Today Facebook has announced a new invite feature for applications: email. Yes, application users can now invite their friends to use your application via e-mail. When users enter their friends email addresses, they are not used against your daily invite allocation limit. I would say that developers should be enthusiastic about this but honestly I’m not sure how much of a value add this feature is.
The invite functionality within Facebook was primarily beneficial for developers thanks to their ability to send application notifications to friends. This new model requests that users enter their friends’ email address, something that Facebook Connect was essentially looking to accomplish. Users that are invited via email are taken to an “Express Registration” page as described in the Facebook developer wiki.
Honestly I think the primary beneficiary of this new feature is Facebook in that they get a few extra users through this new feature. Application developers could have asked for email addresses since the platform launched. Facebook has been increasing their SEO and using every tactic possible to get new user registrations and this appears to be one of them. Will your application be taking advantage of the new invite feature?
Do you think this benefits Facebook or developers more?
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Well it would be 10X better if they tied in Gmail/Hotmail/YahooMail contact imports into it…
Comment by Dan Peguine — December 22, 2008 @ 11:57 am
I think this definitely benefits Facebook more than it does its developers. Apps won’t have access to all user emails, just the small % that are invited via this feature. That doesn’t make it a particularly useful data collection tool.
Comment by Clay Newton — December 22, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
I am having a real bad time getting into Facebook. I joined about 2 weeks ago and you accepted my information including password. I keep getting this message that my e-mail address and my password are invalid. So I resinged and got a different password and you accepted it and I got into facebook. Next time I went to sign in I got the same error message and I can't get in. What can you do to help me get this problem straightened out.
Thank You
Judy Turson
Comment by Judy Turson — March 2, 2009 @ 7:18 pm