Last week Facebook updated their developer platform to restrict some of the more egregious abuses of users by application developers – bait and switch profile advertisements and friend spamming.
Today they announced additional changes. And Facebook also announced that they are changing the way applications are measured to show user engagement instead of just how many users have added an application.
Defending Users Against Abuse
Today they’ve updated the platform again to further restrict questionable behavior. In a blog post on the Facebook developers site, Dave Morin outlines the new rules and says “With the upcoming changes, we hope to shift the balance more in favor of good apps.”
It is now impossible for applications to hide things from profile owners. Previously, applications were showing ads to friends without the owner seeing the ad when looking at his/her own profile.
Facebook has also taken steps to limit invitations sent to friends, and have stopped applications from sending emails to users who’ve added it.
Application Metrics
Morin also says Facebook is going to start giving users more information on which applications are actually being used, as opposed to simply added and forgotten:
This week you’ll see us shift our application directory metrics to a focus on user engagement. This will help inform users as they make decisions on which applications to add as well as shift developer focus to engagement rather than total users. More specifics will be available as we roll out these changes this coming week.
This is a good change. Newer applications with fewer users will now have a way to move up on the charts if users are really engaged with the application. We’ll have to wait and see exactly how they plan on measuring engagement, but overall this is good news for the lesser known but “good” applications that are currently hard to find.
The Quickly Evolving Platform
Facebook is still a young platform, and it’s good that they are taking steps to reduce abuse of the user base. But they don’t seem to be taking any remedial action against past abusers, meaning those applications get to keep the millions of users they’ve racked up using questionable practices.
Since application developers aren’t penalized for finding the weaknesses in the Facebook platform, expect them (and their venture dollars) to continue to focus on finding the next hole to exploit. If Facebook were to slap a few of the worst offenders on the wrist, perhaps others would lose the incentive to engage in bad behavior.
Also, the changes are very cumbersome for even the non-abusers. For example, applications will now need to find another way to contact users since email is out. That creates uncertainty, and reduces the incentive for the good guys to innovate since they don’t know if functionality will disappear.
At the end of the day, it may take more to police this ecosystem than occasional band aids to the platform to stop abuse as it appears. A more subjective reward and punishment system may eventually evolve where Facebook takes an active role in policing the behavior of application developers. It may or may not be a good thing, but it is almost certainly inevitable.
Well, I better hop to it, it won’t be easy setting the benchmarks for engagement, but someone has to do it.
anyone heard of http://www.facebookreboot.com ?
it is where you change your profile pic with the rest of facebook on the 1st of October 2007
This is why i prefer facebook to myspace.
Always working to ensure the highest level of privacy that can be expected to be obtained on a social networking site. When they enabled Apps to be built, they opened the door for massive growth and expansion, but also for abuse.
Nice that they are coming down on abusers
This is a good call, but it has the perverse effect of helping the people who did this stuff in the first place. Slide and RockYou and Social Media have a huge benefit by being first to market and getting to spam away….now they use those networks to charge new apps for visibility. They will still be allowed to monetize their user base, while these new apps have to pay the incumbents for advertising rights. By locking out new apps from these techniques, Facebook has entrenched the power structure.
I guess that it is a good change, but in kind of a “best of of bad options” sort of way. Too bad that they can’t “take back” all the benefit from early abusers.
Far from being able to rise up the app curve by just being good, we are going to see new apps have to cough up large fees to the triopoly that runs the apps business (the new RSS, or RockYou Slide Social Media triopoly) to get themselves discovered, lest their adoption be slower then a Yahoo! acquisition.
This is why people say it’s better to apologize that ask for permission…a good change, but at best a least worst option. I bet a lot of people were wishing they had done this when they had the chance!
This is a good move, to be applauded. Err on the side of caution, facebook, especially since you are now including the younger demographic.
I just experienced the impact of a “questionable” apps in a rather amusing way. It seems that going.com (nee heyletsgo) released a cheesy application called “naughty gifts”. The app tells users they have gifts, and to obtain the gifts they must accept the app – which then prompts users to send ‘gifts’ to their friends. It’s kind of grey-hat if you ask me… somewhat misleading and aggressive enough to seem like malware. These virtual ‘naughty gifts’ are things like sex toys. Well, the app quickly invaded my child’s circle of friends who are ~13 – just old enough to join facebook… suddenly they had all installed this thing without knowing.
It’s not porn, exactly, but some of the parents were unhappy that their 13yo daughters were suddenly sending around pictures of sex dolls, etc.
Anyway, they figured out to uninstall it, but I looked at the message board for the app which had about 450 comments under ‘this app sucks’ complaining about how invasive the app is and its bugginess.
So, I posted a bit of a flame saying I wished they would ban this app and that it looked to be violating the TOS. Well…! Over the day I got dozens of replies – mostly from highschool kids saying things like “chill out old dude, it’s fine – you know nothing about the internet, and we see lots worse than this, so go get stoned and we will too… (ok, I paraphrase). It was a flock of parrots.
Even so, I was impressed that the issues generated discussion.
There are multiple issues besides whether some old geek is being
an overprotective parent. If some malware had invaded my PC and kept
showing me pics of sex dolls, I wouldn’t normally know who its authors were and it would be difficult to prevent. In facebook, the authors list their full names! Not only that, but the FAPI allows good control over both content and mechanism…. so there’s an issue of policy, but also the question of how much difference can the community make by speaking out…
Well I had meant this to be shorter but lack the time to make it so….
Interesting for sure, I hope they still allow developers see how many people have it installed. My news app doesn’t take any information from facebook on signups so I use facebook for these stats.
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This is good news from facebook. Dave Morin from facebook and I were discussing the issues surrounding how people tend to judge an app by it’s raw number of installs.
I always thought there was a better way to display “engagement” which is a more accurate measurement of an application.
Useful applications are where the platform is moving. We are pushing past the first wave of 1 dimensional apps.
More details in this blog post: http://facerevi...-are-a-changin/
Kudos to facebook for these changes. It shows they care.
Rodney Rumford
Go Facebook! Its amazing they’ve implemented App metrics based on our feedback on Sat so quickly.(Saturday’s FB Dev Garage blogged here- http://coolasto...uild-on-fb.html)
Good showcase that facebook wants to listen to users but does not act as big brother.
So for Apps that get to keep past users, its ok, users have the choice to disengage, its so easy on facebook, so facebook has left it to users to decide.
This is good news from Facebook. They have to be careful with how the users feel about applications and those applications that spam friends. The one that really got my goat was the Zombie app. What a piece of sh*t. You can see user voted applications on http://bestoffacebook.com.
The ones that are cr*p and dont get voted are deleted after 10 days
….loving facebook
they should have kept it for students only.
More facebook coverage!
Facebook is web 3.0!
WHOOO HOOOO
The top makers of Facebook apps have ALREADY changed their focus to engagement (over simply count); this is in marked contrast to Myspace. See more at http://lsvp.wor...elf-expression/
As a new facebooker i was astounded as to how fast i was able to build relevant relationships within my industry. but as i looked around i easily encountered incredible amounts of spam. when do the nigerians bankers move in? nice to see that they are “trying” to keep it clean.
Since most of the ad systems integrated into the Facebook platform are CPM, the only benefit of having a bunch of users who installed an application once and never used it was the Facebook directory bump. That is great news that they are going to change that up, and it should be pretty easy to get a daily, weekly, or even hourly average. However, I wonder if FB is leery of what is going to happen when it becomes apparent that some of the “big” applications actually have very few daily users. They have benefited from this perception that the application platform is the greatest thing since the web browser by using the installation numbers. It seems revealing the dirth (sp?) of actual application users relative to the installation numbers is not a good thing for them. But who knows.
I presented the Facebook version of Blip’d in Los Angeles and met David personally who really stood out to me as a steller young professional who cares about how technology affects his life and his friends. I met with Myspace last year on a similar topic and I must say they were more than detached from the reality that the future is not about advertising, it’s about media. I sincerely applaud Facebook and it’s team for reacting quick to how technology clashes with the greed of the human mind.
Facebook has more than heart, they seem to have a digital soul. The more we support them with forward-thinking efforts that defend them from the spammers leaking from Myspace to Facebook, we help preserve the social responsibility of being online the right way. Facebook is like a social anti-virus software platform because people come in all forms and want to influence others in various malicious ways. At least we have 1 company that actively is showing they will at least TRY to do their best at serving their members and they will make mistakes and have victories charting new discoveries as the market evolves. I hope this trend continues to move in the right direction as Facebook can clearly teach a few veteran dot com companies a thing or two about what it means to deliver customer service that defines a market, brand and loyalty that create cheerleaders from it’s customers.
PAY ATTENTION. The next revolution won’t be televised, because soon, everyone is going to get blip’d!!!!
Why doesn’t #12 start his own fake Zuckerberg blog (or Twitter channel)? Might even make me sign up for Twitter. People’s real lives are too boring to follow 24×7, but satiric fake lives may not be.
I’m very disappointed by what’s happened with facebook apps. I tried out about 20 of them last night. The experience reminded me of surfing internet porn circa 1995. Lots of bait and switch, “click here for free stuff!”, and links that take you to app after app after app. It seemed like every other click required me to add some other app. It was blatantly obvious that the app creators were trying to cash out by selling based on # of users and little else.
On one hand, I can’t blame them. Get your money, fellas. But it just seems like we took something that could have actually been great, the proclaimed “social operating system” and turned it into a way for a few guys to make a quick buck. Again, I’m all for capitalism and getting rich off websites…but where’s the benefit to the actual users? Do we have to include 20 links to other apps hidden in every app? Can’t we make something that’s cool? I guess I’m just disappointed with what people have turned this into.
On another note, Fake Zuckerberg rocks. I would follow his blog or twitter.
Facebook is worth 7 billion. Applications on it should be now valued by VCs at their real cost.
It’s good news to hear,, Myspace could learn from them. But I wonder if this also hinders them. lets face it, half if not more are at these social sites to promote something?
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