Facebook calls forced invites a “violation”

In case you missed Rodney’s late night tweets, Facebook sent out an e-mail message last night to all app developers using that “forced invites” trick that simultaneously works so well and pisses people off so much:

Invites Violation
Dear developer,

Your application has been temporarily restricted from using requests/invites. This is because users of your application get trapped in a UI interaction for inviting friends.

If the user clicks the Facebook-rendered buttons “Skip”, “Cancel”, or “Skip This Step”, he must not be re-presented with an invite friends UI unless he explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option.

You should jump over to his post for the whole e-mail, but the gist of it is that you’d better get your ship in line or their not going to let you invite ANY more users.

I think that, given the prevalence of this technique, and the lack of any statements from Facebook about it thus far, it would’ve been more appropriate for them to send out a notice, something like “you have seven days to remove this UI trap from your application, OR ELSE.”

It’s a little like smiling at a child while he reaches slowly for the TV remote and then yelling at him when he grabs it.

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