Facebook Platform Roadmap Update: Invites Now Moving to Inbox in May
Over the last couple weeks, Facebook has updated the timelines on its Developer Roadmap for upcoming changes to application invites. Today, Facebook posted another update, now estimating that application invitations will be transitioned to a new tab in the Inbox sometime in May. Previously, the roadmap indicated invites would be moved sometime in March.
In addition, the timeline given for updates to the share dialogs was also changed from March to May, and the timeline for deprecating requests was changed from “Early/mid 2010″ to “Mid 2010.”
As a reminder, Facebook is planning significant changes to the way app invites and requests work: requests, as they’re known today, will be deprecated, but invites will still exist, though they will now be accessed from the Inbox. Here are the current mockups from the Facebook developer wiki:
Obviously, developers are paying very close attention to the ways Facebook changes the invite interaction flow, which could in turn significantly affect conversion rates and application retention. We’ll have more soon.
March 5th, 2010 at 5:45 am
The big change here is that Invites are going from a filter (which no one goes to, much like the Updates filter here) to a Tab. No mock up of the tab exists to date. While the tab may be more evident, Invites could be lost to users unless getting an invite lights up the “new email” indicator in the top navigation. Based on the way updates work (there is no indicator when a favorited page sends an update), I’m not sure that Invites will get any additional promo.
The other issue with leveraging anything on the “Inbox” page is that with the new homepage design, users are unlikely to go there. The new homepage design allows you to preview the last five messages and not even go to the Inbox page. Thus I believe for invites to be seen by users at all, there needs to be some indicator in that pop up that there are new invites to review.
Facebook also suggests they are going to try to put the invites in the Games Dashboard or Application Dashboard to see which one performs the best. I haven’t seen any numbers yet, but the consensus I have heard from developers is that very few people are regularly going to this page. From a design standpoint, I believe Facebook should reconsider placement and make Games a top-of-every-page navigation point…but then I may be biased ;-)
Eric
March 5th, 2010 at 8:47 am
The bog problem is that counters only works if you have added you app to your bookmarks…