Facebook responds to Application Spam: Smackdown

Paul Jeffries, who leads the Platform Developer Operations & Support team at Facebook, posted this morning on the Official Facebook Blog with a rundown on the new features they’ve put together to deal with the “application spam” problem.

The lesson for app developers: don’t be spammy, you will get smacked.

You can read the whole post, but here are a few of the juicier controls being put in place:

- Applications must now give you advanced warning if you’ll need to invite friends to get information or access content. So you should always know ahead of time if that quiz you’re taking will require you to invite friends to see your results. If you see applications withholding content without warning, go to that application’s About page to report it.

- Your feedback now determines how many communications an application can send. When invitations and notifications are ignored, blocked, or marked as spam, Facebook reduces that application’s ability to send more. Applications forcing their users to send spammy invitations can wind up with no invitations at all. The power is in your hands; block applications that are bothering you, and report spammy or abusive communications, and we’ll restrict the application.

- When you get a request from an application, you now have the ability to “Block Application” directly from the request. If you block an application, it will not be able to send you any more requests.

Kudos to Facebook for putting ever tighter leashes on one of their best potential properties (the app platform) in order to keep users happy. To me, that says that Facebook is still about user experience at least as much as it is about enticing developers, which will benefit the company in the long run.

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