This week, a local news network app called Circle sky-rocketed to the top of Apple's App Store charts.
But, as Valleywag pointed out, the app was incredibly spammy in the way it asked you to invite all your Facebook friends to try out the service.
In response to the mass annoyance expressed by people getting dozens of invites to try the service on Facebook, Circle CEO Evan Reas vowed to revoke the app's spam-blasting behavior on Circle's blog.
Circle will now only send a maximum of three of invites through Facebook and two through text messages per user. It won't let you invite any more than that. You can now rest assured that the number of pointless Facbeook notifications you receive will be going back to normal.
Check out the letter from Circle's CEO in its entirety:
Hey Circle Community!
We are constantly listening to our community feedback and made a couple of recent changes. We really appreciate all your support so far in strengthening your local community and hope you will keep providing us awesome use cases in the app. We also very much appreciate the nice reviews and are so excited to have a 4.6/5 rating on iOS and 4.4/5 on Android.
Thank You!
First, we totally heard your feedback about being unsure about the new layout and design, and specifically not being able to find your friends. We need to make this more obvious. For now, TAP on the city name on the home page (New York, Chicago etc) and it will open up all the categories and tap them to add. Many of the posts are going into "Random" or other categories so make sure to add them to see all the recent posts!
Secondly, over the last few months we have been constantly experimenting with ways to share the application with friends and build your local network. We know that the app is much more useful when your local network is bigger, just like LinkedIn or Facebook. It can be a tough balance to strike to allow people to share the app with their social network but making sure it isn't too much. We do want you to be able to share the app with your friends, but not bombard them with invites so after experimentation we have settled on sending a maximum of only 3 total invites on facebook and 2 invites through SMS. If they are sent more than that, we won't deliver them to the recipient.
This seems like a good balance to us but as always we would absolutely love to hear your thoughts and feedback and you can get in touch with us any time at circleappfeedback@gmail.com. Just yesterday, a member emailed me to tell me that he loved how it felt like Circle is like the old community boards that are in small town cafe's and we absolutely love hearing that.
Thanks for all the support.
cheers,
evan
SEE ALSO: How to use Circle