Facebook’s Event Invitation Approach

Let’s be straight here – I’m not a fan.  I know there’s quite a few facebook haters in the software community (understandably so in some respects I must admit) so this will add fuel to the fire.  One great feature of facebook is the ability to create events, detailing everything about the event and then inviting members.  Myself and Amanda decided to create one for our wedding, quite a few of our friends have already done it so we thought it would be a good idea to spread the word in a quick and easy manner.  Well, I thought it would be quick and easy.

Sure, facebook has some quirks, but this one is particularly frustrating.  When adding members to an event, you have to add them one by one.  That’s right, I’ve got over three hundred friends on my facebook account.  It gets even worse.  You can only add one hundred at a time.  That means I had to click each and every individual, but I couldn’t do it in one go.  It’s fancied up to the eyebrows with AJAX enabling you to select each friend and they’re nicely added to the left pane, but it’s a painstakingly slow process.

Dear twenty-something-year-old-zubrick-dude,

Please add an "invite all members on my friends list" button to the event management page.

Kind regards

An annoyed (yet using your product for free) user.

I guess not everything can be perfect straight away. Oh well.  Why they limit the number of invitations to one hundred at a time is beyond me, perhaps their systems aren’t designed to deal with that? I have no idea, but as an end-user, I shouldn’t need to know.  End-users should ‘expect’ things to work, despite their free-use policy ;)

About Kieran

A twenty-four year old software developer from Guernsey, Channel Islands.
This entry was posted in Pages. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Facebook’s Event Invitation Approach

  1. Amanda Le Prevost says:

    The actual reason you can’t add all of your friends to a group or an invitation at once on facebook (the limit being 100) is because the facebook creator is such a nerd he can count the number of friends on one hand – don’t forget the thumb doesn’t count either.

    p.s the others are his mum, dad and imaginary friend, with himself being the fourth. Therefore excluding his genious streak to rip off the idea of facebook from a friend as well as many previous networking sites, he can’t actually comprehend having to invite that sheer amount of people to an event, as that many friends to him is just extra ordinary.

    Amanda Le Prevost, aka the fiance.

  2. Actually, the reasoning behind the individual add and the 100 friend limit is to keep the spam down. imagine if anyone could create an event and add their 5,000 friends in 30 seconds…it would be full of spam and we would all have 100 event invitations every day. My 3,000 friends take about 3 hours to add with an auto clicker. you can create a group or a page which would be the only form of ‘mass marketing’ on facebook. I have a page http:facebook.coocicouture.com and use it to mass market my website, website content, and youtube channel.

    Timothy Cooci Bredemeyer

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>