Invite friends and comment from Facebook

[Armani Rouse]

The minute that Ning releases the "invite friends from facebook" feature ALL OF OUR NETWORKS WILL SEE A HUGE INCREASE IN TRAFFIC AND MEMBERS!

Heres some things Ning wants to keep in mind when designing and creating this feature:

1) invite friends from facebook should be geared to where when a user does attempt to add a friend from facebook their facebook profile picture shows up when you type the persons name in and when a user hovers over it just as it does on facebook.

2) when a new member joins from facebook after the initial invite, it should give them the option to add all of their friends from their facebook account as well, automatically generating their facebook friends list so access is easy

3) non members should be allowed to comment on anything in our network and it should be an on/off feature for network admins to be able to control. You dont want the ability for anyone to be able to just randomly comment on your site content especially if its negative and has nothing to do with your site and the progress of your site. Members should be able to use this feature as promotion for their site meaning members can spread the word to their friends who arent on your network that even if their not members they can comment from facebook or twitter which would ultimately lead to them creating an account with your network eventually. The purpose of this should be to drive "incentive" to join our networks. If others are able to chime into the conversation, ultimately it'll end up becoming a new membership, if they want full access to the conversation or whats happening on your site then they have to sign up! But commenting from facebook would definitely drive traffic, i've personally incorporated almost every facebook plug in available and all of my members who sign in through facebook use the plug ins to share their content to and fro...add this immediately!

overall, the sooner were able to invite our facebook friends Ning in general is going to become an even more popular website building network. Honestly speaking, I wouldve voted having the "invite friends from facebook" feature before they created the mobile version. I simply dont see how important it is to have a mobile version to networks that as mark zuckerberg him self said "will never be done". When you think about creation, every network creator here will agree that they find themselves tweaking some sort of code or feature on their site DAILY! I myself wont go to sleep until a certain feature is done and created, so having a mobile version right now satisfies a very small portion of what all of us creators here are trying to accomplish which is BUILDING OUR NETWORK FROM WHAT WE THOUGHT WERE GREAT IDEAS AND MISSING NICHES IN THE SOCIAL NETWORK MARKET. The mobile versions of our sites are awesome dont get me wrong, but whats the point of having a mobile version if you dont have the adequate members to visit the site in the first place? If friends were able to comment and be invited from the largest social network its naturally going to drive traffic and ultimately Ning would be in a very good position revenue wise. Think of this discussion as a dry erase board (lol) jot down all the details and specifics before you draft a great idea! These features should be top priority to Ning, anything else is kind of secondary, we dont need better mobile versions of our site, we need more traffic and members on our site. My site wellkunnected.com actually promotes PC's HEAVY...we had a slogan "well kunnected....get back to a PC" everything is "dumbed down" with all this mobile stuff, people need to remember the joy of being at a PC and being able to explore sites in full opposed to settling for what was created as a "mobile version"

[Eric Suesz]

Not sure if it will result in a "HUGE INCREASE IN TRAFFIC AND MEMBERS", but the ability to invite friends from Facebook will probably be released this week.