Facebook’s latest developer tool called the Invite API now lets your friends send you those annoying application invites by Facebook Chat. Now instead of obliquely ignoring the invite-happy Facebook newbies in your life, you’ll have to actually tell them to go fly a kite.

When Facebook switched over to the tabbed profile pages, their developer community felt slighted. With their applications pushed from the main profile page, Facebook developers have been searching for a way to promote their applications.

The new system relies on the social pressure of sending the invite in real time when your friends know that you’re online. Now you will be forced to make a decision right then and there without the option of quietly ignoring some requests.

There are some Facebook applications that are useful for staying in touch with friends or sharing a little bit of your personality on your profile. However there are dozens that have little or no value and duplicate the same functionality.

You want to send a free drink, a St Patty’s day green beer or an imaginary fruity cocktail from one of the dozen applications created for that purpose.  That doesn’t mean your friends want to install each and every one of them.

If that were to happen, Facebook profiles would end up cluttered with applications, sparkly things and animated comments. Nobody wants to dress their profile up like a tween girl’s MySpace page – not even a tween girl.

This move also blows Facebook’s chances of turning its chat feature into a massive IM platform outside of its Web presence. Other IM providers get enough spam without actually creating an API to encourage it.

Maybe you actually want to see more invites, more applications and more ways to interact with your friends on Facebook. If you just can’t get enough fancy Facebook invites, tell us about it in the comments.

Otherwise you might just want to stay signed out of Facebook chat.

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Entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 10:47 am under Opinion, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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