Facebook Issues

Facebook is a great tool. I have been using it since mid-2004 and have hardly had a problem with this killer internet app. However, lately as I have been trying to use Facebook as a marketing tool for my internet series Tucson Underground, I have come into some rather annoying difficulties. First, we created a group and invited all of our friends to join to show their support and also so that we could have an easy way to mass message our audience. After a little while, we maxed out on the friends of the creators and we wanted to get more members.

Problem number one: There is no simple way for members of a group to invite all of their friends. A given member has no other option than to sit at their computer sending one invite at a time.

Problem number two: As a work around to issue number one, we gave certain friends of ours admin status so that they could add all of their friends to the list in a more streamlined way (admins can select all their friends and then invite, instead of sending out one at a time). Problem is, the Facebook server cannot handle sending out so many invites at once, so the browser just stops.

Problem number three: Apparently some of the invites from those lists were sent out to individuals who became members of the group. However, the list of people waiting to be sent invites did not change. I contacted Facebook and they told me to remove the invites and start over using only 300 at a time. So I started to go through removing hundreds of invites. Next thing I know, our member numbers have dropped about 60 members. What happened was, certain people were already in the group and when I removed them from the invite list, I accidentally removed them from the group itself. Balls in my mouth.

So now I am in a back and forth email conversation with Facebook's tech support. Hopefully this will all be resolved shortly.

If Facebook plans on being the dominant social network they need to ensure that their infrastructure is expanding as fast as the members of the network need it or they will surely run into more problems. This is especially true as people turn Facebook into a place of business (especially marketing) as well as pleasure. Having to cap the number of invites sent and making it extremely tedious for people to invite all their friends to a group only slows Facebook's growth.

I am still a fan of Facebook and I still think it is the best option out there at the moment.

Oh, by the way, Facebook is down right now so I had to find another way to kill a few minutes and this is what happened. Yet another reason for Facebook to get their shit together.