Facebook and spam: a race to the bottom

It seems getting app installs on Facebook has become harder in the Platform’s second month. Most users know not to invite a ton of friends when trying out a new app and Facebook limits apps to inviting only 20 friends max.

In response, RockYou has become more aggressive, making it increasingly harder to use their apps without sending at least one invitation to another friend, and “daisy-chaining” invites from multiple apps to circumvent Facebook’s limits.

For example, if you try the Likeness app, it first prompts you to invite the max of 20 friends (of course, no skip button). If you find your way past this screen, you’re immediately prompted to add the SuperWall app and invite friends using SuperWall (in case a user exhausted the max of 20 invites, RockYou thus convinces them to also send another 20 invites using SuperWall, thus getting a total of 40 invites out of the one user).

Note of course that again there’s no skip button (screenshot below). EVERY user who tries the Likeness app upon receiving an invite is immediately guided into inviting more friends (no skip), and then into the SuperWall app to invite more friends (again no skip). Worse yet, these screens don’t even make it clear that what you’re about to do is send invitations to 20 friends! I can imagine a lot of profiles are gonna get cluttered with apps that people never really intended to forward.

(thanks for the app developer who tipped me off to write about this. I’m going to invite other developers to contribute ideas to this blog)

Slide and RockYou have perfected a new technique.

Across their applications (RockYou’s Likeness application, Yahoo/RockYou’s Music Videos, Slide’s FunWall, RockYou’s SuperWall, and more) they present users with invite screens that have no visible skip button.

In the screenshot below from RockYou’s Music Videos application, the only way to proceed to the application without inviting friends is to first unselect the friends, and then to click the button for “Invite Friends” (and pray that nobody is being invited). There is no other way to skip this step.

Note also that RockYou presents the user with a nice teaser: “Who do you want to compare music tastes with?” (copied from iLike, the popular music app on Facebook), even though the RockYou app doesn’t provide the functionality for comparing music tastes or calculating music compatibility that iLike offers.