Execution is the key #4: the invitation system

So we are no in a social digital world. Whether we want it or not, most web platforms are becoming social, meaning enabling users to build around him his virtual tribe within a service. This is obvious when you think of social networks but it is happening with all new generations of services (think Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo Answers, Second Life,...)

The building process of your social tribe is both active and passive. You send requests or you get requests. With the time, you get drawn by the number of invitations across networks which becomes painful to manage. And this is where the problem i am spotting more and more begins and i don't know any web company that has solved it smartly so far (please indicate me if i have missed something). I think it is time web companies start to implement a new invitation system

 

What is the source of the problem?

It has become much more easier to create and use an active building process: until very recently the only way to invite your friend in a web platform was to either send an email from your regular email to a specific person/groups you want to be close to or use the web service invitation system that enables you to add manually email after email.

Recently most webmails opened their APIS so it became easier to "swallow" a contact book from Gmail/Yahoo/LiveMail... and then send requests to all your friends from the inner invitation system of a specific service. You just need to add your credentials, upload your address book, select contacts, send out.

Most people do not bother with the filter process and just send out an invitation to all. But worse: email contact books get built automatically, without you knowing it. In Gmail for example if someone sends you an email or your sent back an email to someone you do not really know, the address is added automatically to your contact book. Invitations will then be sent to people you do not necessarily really know. The flow is getting started... Social invitation systems have become much more easier for an active member than for a passive recipient to manage.

The second source of the problem is the inability to really take a decision from the invitation itself. You receive an invitation. 3 cases:

• this is someone you know very well. You only have one decision to make: whether the service interests you or not, since the people filter do not apply here.
• this is someone you know but not so well: you will need to evaluate both the service and the interest to connect to that person within the service
• This is someone you don't know at all: it will be unlikely you decide to connect to that person even if the service is great. Meaning you could miss a great service because you received an invitation from the wrong person

The problem is that ALL invitations (at least all invitation i have received so far) do not help you solving the evaluation of the sender in case 2/3.

Third source of the problem, the validation process: with the exponential growth of services like Facebook/Twitter and others you may end up easily receiving tens of invitations. You will have to evaluate for each one of them the interest to connect with such a person. But no one is giving you the tools to do that correctly. For each invitation you have to go to the personal page of the invitation sender and then come back to the page and decide. This is becoming a nightmare if you have to do that 10 times

Worst: some validation process force you to qualify your contact. Facebook for example do not let you the choice but to see that annoying screen before you confirm. In my opinion this is to raise artificially the number of pages views and is bothering many users. I want an invitation systems that save me clicks and time

So here is what i would expect from a good invitation system

• An invitation that do not get to my Spam box: many web services forget to take the necessary measures to avoid to be flagged as spam, and still today i see every now and then invitation in my spam box
• An invitation email that enables me to evaluate the service AND the sender: the message should include a picture, a few lines/key words of the person + a two line description of the service (generally you get that) including a screenshot or two or link to video demo. Ning do not really do that for example
• A one click invite all/Reject All feature: Twitter was forced to implement it due to the number of average request received. But Facebook and LinkedIn do not do that

• A one click accept/reject for one/several users, qualification is optional and can be deactivated

• If i skip email invitations an easy mouse over preview of the profile of the sender: LinkedIn is the only one to do that today. And i believe this is a must have feature

• A history tracker : possibility to know from which date i am connected
• A proximity qualifier: a slider that would enable me to rate (for private usage) my contacts and filter them for social interactions (Top Friends is partly doing that and that's why it is so popular in FaceBook). An not only at registrations, I want it to be available all the time since the relation is likely to evolve with time.
• An easy "leave this person" feature
• An invitation system that groups invitation in one email at once and give me control on frequency of reception

Any other ideas?

Technorati Tags: social network, invitation, attention crash

Comments

[Adam Benayoun]

A smart invitation feature such as:

- Ability to install a small Outlook plugin that will allow to count the number of interaction with some user s (based on their email) and based on if the user is added to your address book and how is he classified. Each user will receive a number in the range of 1-10 that will tell how important it is for you.
The service will be able to flag certain invitation as important or not based on your relation to them. You could eventually give the service access to few other key social network (such as linkedin or facebook) and based on these social network and the email ranking, it will be able to flag the importance of the user requesting your invitation.
We plan to have a very strict invitation system, The world is ruled by the ability to invite As much as users in order to grow and to make a social network richer. Since our product will be based on quality and not quantity and we plan to plan our metrics for valuation of our service/business on the correlation/relation between the users within a certain network rather than the pageview, such invitation and flag system will allow us to build a quality network around our service.
I hope that openID or some other network will allow us to track in the future the personal identity of a person and offer an API that allow service to understand the importance between 2 openID account based on relations in the past and possible relations for the future.

[Yaron Galai]

At the end of the day, the lowest common denominator between all these social networks is the address book because everyone I know should be in there.

It's pretty crazy that you need to suck your entire address book into every social network (or other web services) because it immediately starts "decaying" vs my original address book.

So in my mind, there is only one company in the world that has the potential to manage all of this properly, and that is Plaxo. Plaxo should be our single, unified, synchronized address book, and it should offer a way to set links (or permissions) to every person I know via every social network I participate in. So for example, I could use Plaxo to friend you with my business alias on Facebook, LinkedIn and my personal alias on Gtalk, and maybe not at all on MySpace.

I don't think Plaxo is going in that direction, but I sure wish they did... it's getting crazy to manage all these instances of personal links with the same people over and over....

[ouriel]

Yaron, this is not solving the management aspect of invitation. You would still have to deal with the process of validating high number of invitations here and there.

I agree it would help solving the evaluation process regarding the sender of the invitation

[jean carl]

These posts about "execution is the key" are very appreciated....well done and please carry on

[Drew]

Have you seen any good invitation systems that web site owners could use?