No offense taken, it's really a matter of how you think invites should be used. Personally I'm fine with motivating people to invite their friends - so long as it's not forced on them. At the bottom of it all, my users are given the choice, whether or not my incentive might sway them.
The other reasoning for my invite system is that I created the first "Top Friends" app to make it into the Facebook directory (when there were about 50 apps total). I had actually beaten Slide to their own TopFriends release and was pretty far ahead on users compared to their TF app for a couple of weeks.
At one point, however, I noticed they had been growing at a much faster rate. Turns out that Slide had been forcing users to mass-invite every single friend when they added the app, something I distinctly chose not to do (out of goodwill for my users). Well, I know where that strategy now got me -- beaten by the company that now runs the top app on Facebook with 20+ million users.
So as a developer, leveraging invites in such a conservative manner was a bad mistake and I'll never forget that multi-million dollar lesson.
The other reasoning for my invite system is that I created the first "Top Friends" app to make it into the Facebook directory (when there were about 50 apps total). I had actually beaten Slide to their own TopFriends release and was pretty far ahead on users compared to their TF app for a couple of weeks.
At one point, however, I noticed they had been growing at a much faster rate. Turns out that Slide had been forcing users to mass-invite every single friend when they added the app, something I distinctly chose not to do (out of goodwill for my users). Well, I know where that strategy now got me -- beaten by the company that now runs the top app on Facebook with 20+ million users.
So as a developer, leveraging invites in such a conservative manner was a bad mistake and I'll never forget that multi-million dollar lesson.