{"id":443,"date":"2008-11-22T00:40:47","date_gmt":"2008-11-22T05:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=443"},"modified":"2008-11-22T00:40:47","modified_gmt":"2008-11-22T05:40:47","slug":"bebocom-and-usable-social-networking-invite-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/bebocom-and-usable-social-networking-invite-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"Bebo.com and Usable Social Networking Invite Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/photos\/photo\/2962698355\/jellyfish.html\" class=\"tt-flickr tt-flickr-Small\" title=\"Upside-down Jellyfish for an upside-down invite system\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3009\/2962698355_8571c773f5_m.jpg\" alt=\"Upside-down Jellyfish for an upside-down invite system\" width=\"192\" height=\"240\" \/><\/a>  An apology to anyone who got an unwanted invite to social networking site Bebo.  <\/p>\n<p>I tend to join and try out a lot of social apps as I run into them.  I was signing up for Bebo when I got to the part of the process where you add friends to your account.  First I saw the section I wanted, &#8220;<em>Friends found on Bebo who are in your address book:<\/em>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Next, there&#8217;s a section, &#8220;<em>Friends of friends on Bebo who you MAY know:<\/em>&#8221;  I started down this list but noticed many duplicates from the first list.  Normally this kind of duplication is a minor usability issue, since it wastes some screen real estate and a small amount of user attention. But in this case the duplicates were so prevalent I scrolled back to the top and clicked the &#8220;Add Friends&#8221; button.<\/p>\n<p>Had I kept scrolling, I would have seen the &#8220;<em>Invite friends to Bebo from your address book:<\/em>&#8221; section with every email address checked by default.  <\/p>\n<p>Every social networking site has a feature like this, and it fuels the exponential growth that some of these sites experience.  But sending an in-site friend invite is very different from sending a email invite.  Most of us have email contacts who fall into various categories &#8211; friends, co-workers, people we&#8217;ve bought stuff from, former bosses, friends&#8217; parents, etc.  Very few people would want to actually send out invites to every single email address in their address book, so that should never be the default behavior.  <\/p>\n<p>So, yeah, sorry for the Bebo invite spam.  <\/p>\n<p>In other news, I just sent out over 3300 emails to people who voted in the baby name poll and left their email address.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An apology to anyone who got an unwanted invite to social networking site Bebo. I tend to join and try out a lot of social apps as I run into them. I was signing up for Bebo when I got to the part of the process where you add friends to your account. First I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[551,225,552,195,746,177],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-bebo","tag-email","tag-invitations","tag-social-networking","tag-usability","tag-user-interface-design"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}