Take some time browsing through the Facebook developers forum and you’ll notice that the biggest complaint from developers is that the forced invite applications are killing it for the rest of them. They are probably right but then again a great application will usually get the exposure that it deserves even if it doesn’t use aggressive techniques that I’ve been repeating over the past few days.
One of my readers sent me a useful bookmarklet that avoids all Facebook applications that use the forced invite model. At the time I couldn’t go test it out because I couldn’t find any forced any invite applications off hand. Instead, I took a look at the code to see what it was and it appears as a logical solution. I tried adding it to Internet Explorer 7 but was unsuccessful. It worked well in Firefox.
Even if forced invites have not been banned, this bookmarklet is a great temporary solution. In the long-run, Facbeook is going to be forced to penalize any application that leverage spammy measures for promoting their application. Using bookmarklets such as the one that mass rejects all application invites reported by numerous other blogs over the weekend are simply short-term solutions.
In a large scale environment, even small changes can have big impacts. That may be why Facebook has been slow to make minor changes. Instead they have been focusing heavily on rolling out new products and services. Not a bad strategy by any means considering the impressive set of new services that they plan on rolling out in the first quarter alone. Do you think forced invites have ruined Facebook applications?
I verified that it works with "Are You Interested?" using Firefox v. 2. It did not work with Firefox 3 beta.
Comment by Gaurav — January 29, 2008 @ 6:53 am
I verified that it works with “Are You Interested?” using Firefox v. 2. It did not work with Firefox 3 beta.
Comment by Gaurav — January 29, 2008 @ 10:53 am
Confirming that it does work with Firefox v.2It's a great tool, thanks for keeping us up to date with innovations for Facebook like this!!
Comment by Alicia — February 2, 2008 @ 11:21 am
Confirming that it does work with Firefox v.2
It's a great tool, thanks for keeping us up to date with innovations for Facebook like this!!
Comment by Alicia — February 2, 2008 @ 12:21 pm