As if to prove my point, I just came across this evidence that Facebook users really are starting to backlash against applications that force invitations. Alongside the rapidly growing groups (like this one), this research pretty much proves what was already pretty clear, that users don’t want to have to pimp their friends to an application just in order to use it.

If a developer makes a decent application that I think my friends will be interested in then sure, I’ll invite them. Forcing viral growth by telling me I have to invite 20 friends before doing anything works in completely the opposite way, as the polls show, in that 61% of users will uninstall the app rather than invite friends. It’s a pity my friends aren’t in that 61%.

Forced invites also applies to those applications that you can happily use without inviting people, until they present you with a ’skip free’ invitation page. For the more computer savvy user it’s a basic case of navigate away from the page, but amongst Facebook’s population of millions there are plenty of people who may not understand that this is not something Facebook is forcing you to do, but something an application developer is trying to force you to do.

Facebook - please stop forced invites!

via Saunderslog.com

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As someone who is constantly on Facebook for work, I manage to quite easily stay on top of any requests or notifications that come my way. I had assumed that this was the case with everyone, but had recently started to notice that a lot of my friends were piling up notifications and messages due to the fact that most of the time they’re invitations to applications that someone was forced to send or messages from groups that nobody cares about.

These are very similar to the reasons why most people abandoned Myspace, the endless friend requests from fake users.

Today Facebook took a step towards keeping it’s userbase happy, adding an ‘Ignore All’ button for users that have more than 25 notifications. I can’t help but think this pretty much defeats the object of having notifications, and seems to assume that all notifications are spam, but at least it shows that they are working on something to fight this problem. I think a more relevant solution would be to block applications from forcing users to invite 20 friends before using an application instead, but we’ll see where this one goes.

Via allfacebook

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Facebook application developers are continually informed that no guarantees are made as to the status of the Facebook platform so, should any errors occur, there can be no real complaints.  In fact, erros with the platform are frequent, with many developers of more complex applications fearing the weekly “Platform Update” like some kind of plague.

Yesterday, however, there seemed to be an even larger problem than normal, with most applications failing to load 9 out of 10 times.  Facebook generally carry out updates in the dead of night (US time) but for some reason yesterday, the problems continued throughout the day, with users seeing an error message instead of the application.  The problem with the error message is that it put a large amount of blame for the failure on the application developer, who, in this case, was not the one to blame.

As with any piece of beta software, you must expect there to be bugs with the Facebook platform as they strive to introduce great new features that not only improve the user experience but also make things easier for the developer (eg. the latest animations scripts).  However the Facebook platform is different from most other beta software in that there is a great deal of money on it.  Application developers are making a lot of money on advertising and selling source code, and Facebook’s own social ads are flooded with adverts for applications, netting them a fair few quid.

I don’t think yesterdays errors will mark any kind of change in the way things go in terms of Facebook app development, and in fact it may have only got me angry because I was working on the platform at the time, but I thin Facebook need to seriously review the way they update their platform if they want to keep developers on their side.

Continue reading “Facebook Platform Trouble” »

Welcome one and all to this… fingertap media’s new and improved website and blog. The brain child of the whole fingertap team, the new site has been in product for a little over six weeks, we’ll all happy about it’s final completion - we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

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