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I don't want this to sound like a personal attack, but personally I'd consider the "prizes for invites" thing to be barely a step above the "forced invites" thi

by hugh 19y ago

I don't want this to sound like a personal attack, but personally I'd consider the "prizes for invites" thing to be barely a step above the "forced invites" thing. Either way, you're encouraging people to spam their friends -- not because they think their friends would be interested in this particular app, but in order to get some miniscule personal benefit ($500 divided by how many users?) Personally, I'd be happy to see the ability to send invites turned off altogether. If any friend of mine really thinks I'll be interested in a particular app, they can damn well take the time to write me a message about it.

kirse 19y ago
No offense taken, it's really a matter of how you think invites should be used. Personally I'm fine with motivating people to invite their friends - so long as it's not forced on them. At the bottom of it all, my users are given the choice, whether or not my incentive might sway them. The other reasoning for my invite system is that I created the first "Top Friends" app to make it into the Facebook directory (when there were about 50 apps total). I had actually beaten Slide to their own TopFriends release and was pretty far ahead on users compared to their TF app for a couple of weeks. At one point, however, I noticed they had been growing at a much faster rate. Turns out that Slide had been forcing users to mass-invite every single friend when they added the app, something I distinctly chose not to do (out of goodwill for my users). Well, I know where that strategy now got me -- beaten by the company that now runs the top app on Facebook with 20+ million users. So as a developer, leveraging invites in such a conservative manner was a bad mistake and I'll never forget that multi-million dollar lesson.