On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 19:16 +0300, Gary Sedyh wrote:
> Let me summarize it. We need to choose one variant. Please see below.
> 1) Using “Facebook Invite (Request) Form” After selecting your
> friends and pressing button for sending invitations we are able to
> send posts to friend’s that we selected earlier using FB Invite form
> (ids of selected friends are coming in POST). I can also make that we
> can perform sending Wall posts (using send stream dialogs) after
> sending invitations and page reload.
> 2) Using custom Friend Selector (developed by me) will NOT ALLOW
> us to invite friends, we can only send posts to friend’s walls. Pls
> describe the whole scheme how it should work (step by step).
Ok, so this bring an interesting subject to discuss. : )
Basically, the main idea behind invitations in Card Stories is to try to
generate, as much as possible, conversations and interactions on the
players wall/news feed. Since game notification have been "hidden" a few
months ago by Facebook (to push developers to buy more ads...), players
don't pay much attention to this. The news feed is the real important
part.
Thus the focus on using the wall to "invite" (though it's not an
invitation per se - using wall posts for invitations is forbidden by the
Facebook ToS, but from what I know Facebook leaves some margin for
interpretation here).
So, for the two options:
1) Facebook invites are likely to remain unnoticed by a lot of players.
It's a nice-to-have extra, but if we can avoid using it as the main way
to generate the first interaction between players, and focus instead on
the wall, it would be good.
2) Posting on friends wall only is better, but this actually made me
think we could get a bit spammy if players post on *each* of their
friends wall when they invite them.
So, I'm thinking that we could rather post the initial "game
announcement" only on the author player's own wall, pretty much like the
way the author announces the final results.
This pushes toward option 1) then (you publish the announcement on your
wall and then send game invites to individual players). But then the
issue with that is that Facebook policies ask to provide a way to skip
posts on walls. If players are able to send individual invitations, a
lot of them might skip the post on their wall, and just rely on the game
invitations - which would have exactly the opposite effect than what is
intended.
So I was thinking about a radical approach: no game invitations and no
posts on the friends wall - only the one on the author player's wall. Of
course, because of FB policies, we would have to provide an alternative
to invite (it could simply be giving the game session URL for the users
to spread it themselves - which would push to use the post on the wall,
as it's easier).
Since this is a radical approach, there is no way to predict if it would
work better. So the best here would be to test both options IMHO - to
remain within the scope of the specifications, I would go for option 1,
with the following alterations:
* First, before asking to select friends, ask the user to post on
his wall to announce the game creation and allow his friends to
join
* Then, in a second step, use the friend selector to send
individual invitations. Make it possible to easily deactivate
this step from our side (we'll then be able to test the effect
on virality of letting players use game invitations, by
deactivating it at first and then activating it)
Does that make sense? What do you think?
Xavier.
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