Don't Cry Over Your Facebook Invites

Over the last week those of us with Facebook applications have had to try to figure out how to deal with a dramatic decrease in invites that can be sent from an app.  The whole point of developing on the Facebook platform is to be able to have the opportunity to jump into a viral loop and now one of our key accelerators is gone.  Yes, this is frustrating to deal with but I believe all legitimate social application developers and marketers will benefit from this move. 

It's pretty simple, there is obviously a lot of abuse by developers of the Facebook platform.  No matter what changes Facebook makes there are going to be developers who are going to try and figure out how to game the system.  Facebook has a responsibility to its end users to protect them from this abuse.  If they don't we will see users abandoning the application directory if not Facebook as a whole.  We should expect the invite (and the news and mini-feed) rules to continue to change.  Since there is absolutely nothing any of us (at least those of us who don't work at Facebook) can do about these rule changes, the best strategy is to focus on the core value your application is offering to the end user.

Those of us who focus on creating social applications that engage the end user in a meaningful way will ultimately build a user base that is loyal and can be monetized.  Having the application itself rather then the hooks into the underlying social platform being the key motivator to end users is a very good thing for us in the social application world.