Facebook announced a number of steps today to battle the growing problem of application spam – stuff that is sent from your Facebook friends asking you to try out new services. Generally, applications force users to send these invitations in order to get access to the more interesting features.
The result can be dozens or hundreds of messages a day asking you to join some service that you really don’t want to join. And if you do join it, you make the whole spam cycle continue.
The growing problem has led to a number of users taking matters into their own hands, Facebook-style. The “No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application!” group on Facebook, for example, now has nearly 100,000 followers.
Facebook, eager to avoid “Pulling a Plaxo,” isn’t sitting still either. They’ve shown a willingness to put a stop to bad behavior by application developers in the past. Today, they announced additional steps on their blog.
First, users can block applications when they receive a request, so no additional requests from that app will get through. Second, they added a “clear all” requests feature that erases all pending requests (my new favorite, and most used, Facebook feature). Also, Facebook is watching how many people block or ignore application requests – too many, and an application has restrictions placed on it.
There are a few other tweaks as well, which will hopefully have the combined effect of reducing the problem. I also have my own method for dealing with it – by removing friends who get too spammy.
finally, they should had done this right after they released app platform.
i know many of my friends who liked facebook in its early days but started to get annoyed with this app chaos.
Thank you facebook! Now if I could only stop getting Tagged invitations…
Ahhhh..life in the day of a FB junkie must be total hell
so basically the apps who bought in day 1 (did they pay?) are the only ones who will ever see a large user base.
These kinds of problems will plague Facebook forever. There’s a real tension between driving page views and keeping users happy. Tough job.
I think it a shame that so many developers have so little respect for their users. A hint to these people: if you treat people like crap you may profit in the short term, but in the long term you are ruining things not only for yourself, but for everybody else.
Something about a golden goose comes to mind.
This is identity theft: an application is sent to me from my friend’s account without my friend’s intention (as I understand).
Glad to see FB doing something against this annoying trend.
@Garth, it’s what the investors want to see.
why don’t they just disallow requiring invites to gain access?
It seems spam will hit any new internet idea eventually. These Facebook application invites have ruined the interest for many users to install or even take a glance at a new application. It’s quite sad to see some developers ruin it for all.
So glad this has happened
Great, this is perfect! Now amazing and useful apps like Zombies and Vampires can keep their user bases without having to worry about new competitors.
I really love those Zombies! I cant wait to bite more chumps:(
It’s very simple.
Application invites are the forwarded e-mails of our generation.
Is any of this going to be included in their mobile apps? I am so sick of getting 15 application requests on my bberry facebook app every morning.
How about putting a cap on users ability to send invites – you can only send 10 invites a day, total, for all applications. Would at least compel spammy friends to be more selective and not send it to me since I never accept their request!
this is a very good thing for fb in general but it heavily favors the major incumbents (slide+rockyou to name a few) that built a major portion of their massive presence through the use of these tactics. now they have the astronomical lead in installs – and all new comers have to get them the hard(er) way. of course they cannot be entirely blamed it was the thousands of new apps that really pushed the limit.
Anything that reduces the clutter is a very good thing – just hope people don’t get too over zealous about ignoring apps, some a still really really cool and the best is yet to come.
“stuff that is sent from your Facebook friends asking you to try out new services”
Isn’t that how Facebook wanted to make money?
“this is a very good thing for fb in general but it heavily favors the major incumbents (slide+rockyou to name a few”
I bet that Slide and RockYou lobbied for this change to be made. Facebook could have made the platform spam free and fair from the get go. Why didn’t they? Because they don’t care about you. Or fairness. They care about money. And staying relevant for longer than 2 years, which they won’t.
“They care about money. And staying relevant for longer than 2 years, which they won’t.”
I too was thinking about the relevance factor – and will facebook self destruct?
by removing friends who get too spammy.
I stopped sending invites months ago to avoid this issue.
What about the Flixster quizzes with the embedded requests at the tail end of the quiz? If you’re not paying attention, you suddenly SPAM 20 friends with a Movies from the 80’s quiz.
I mean, I’m okay with wasting a bit of my time, but don’t make me the unknowing ambassador of time-suck to my friends.
facebook should sell out to yahoo or something, because I think it’s become a bit to unwieldy for the young guys running it. a bit of hubris to turn down $1 billion, i think.
They should make the group “No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application!” into an application. That way we can invite friends to join.
This should finish removing the point in creating useless apps for Spambook. Now we’ll really see if this whole thing is just another fad. And “those who have too many friends have no friends”, as the old saying put it.
Linkedin and other business oriented SNs have a real business model behind them, at least.
This sort of control should have been deployed before FB opened up their platform. Sometimes the best intentions have unintended consequences – this said maybe FB understands the error of their own ways (BEACON).
Honestly, there is an easy way to avoid sending those invites (with the exception of the ones that reward you for it).
After you ad the application, just exit your browser/tab, and type in Facebook.com again.
The application is still there (at least it was with the one app I used), and you dont have to send out a single invite.
There is all ready a group called “Official Facebook Petition: To ban the inviting of friends on Applications” that has 630,550 members.
Everything gets spammed or exploited sooner or later.
“removing friends”.
Sometimes we should just stop to hear ourselves talk about this “social” stuff….
Anything that reduces the clutter is a very good thing – just hope people don’t get too over zealous about ignoring apps, some a still really really cool and the best is yet to come.
www. i – guide .ro
The just say no picture is fu****g funny
Lol, “I also have my own method for dealing with it – by removing friends who get too spammy.” You don’t really do that do you? Lol
@Blake Shannon
Actually, that group have already grown to 651,311 by now.. and counting.
http://cbs.face...?gid=9912127233
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In my opinion the whole invite/spam issue is one of the biggest problems facebook have faced so far – and I don’t understand why they haven’t addressed it earlier! It’s going to take a long time before anyone in the current userbase will trust the invite system again, that lack of trust will properly hurt the development of new creative and innovate apps:
If someone were to create a top notch app tomorrow that people really *wanted* to forward to all their friends, the invites wouldn’t have any special viral effect – since most people by now consider all app invites as spam..
I didn’t see anything about forcing apps to use opt-in vs. opt-out when it comes to “mail to 30 friends” step. I hate having to always unselect the random friends it chooses for me.
Ditto…but…
Before we get too elated about FB finally being on the user side, let’s recognize this will increase the drive to app advertising placed BY FACEBOOK through the patterns they see on the network. So, goodbye to Friend Spam, hello to a ramp on FACEBOOK ad sponsored spam, utilizing their knowledge of your friend networks.
It is a balance, and this kind of move also shifts more ad power back to FaceBook. It may have the effect of weeding out apps which can’t pay, but that is hardly a quality-driven discriminator.
Yeah, I donts like spam neither.
Just my 2 cents.
rayreggie@nexlevelgroup.com
Friend spam is pretty bad. My secretary sends me a LOT of spam, but I cant fire her becasue she is so valuable.
What is a LB to do?
I love spam. It gets me off… if you know what I mean! hehehe
So many bugs and glitches makes windows look good!!
Let’s identify the real culprits: our own “friends”.
FB is a medium to connect with people, and no one connects with people better than advertisers. This is what they do and there is nothing new or abnormal about them delivering solicited adverts.
Yes, solicited.
It is we and our friends who are to blame. Both we and our friends had clear opportunity and choice to deny the application developers their avenue of access, but we each opted in because we like the network benefits of FB.
Most users buy into the social networking status image of “more friends = more popular” and accept lots of peripheral acquaintances who aren’t really friends at all, and at least in my experience it’s those tertiary friend-of-a-friend friends that cause the problems.
Jay Neely said “Application invites are the forwarded e-mails of our generation.” Totally true. “Spam”, whether by email, snail mail, door-to-door solicitors, or FB applications, is a fact of life, and especially in the case of FB not a fault of the service we all enjoy for *free*.
Dear facebook,
I have discovered several severe holes in the site that should have been caught by
Quality Assurance, but somehow have slipped through and remain on the site.
These are not security holes, but holes that are liable to
slowly erode the face of facebook and dissolve confidence in the product by
many members and most hurtful, non-members.
In the invite feature of fb, I accidentally accepted the fb
feature to invite every single person that I have every emailed, CCed, or BCed
in my entire life from Gmail. (hmm, a warning message would have been nice,
once clicked, surely I would not have wanted to do that.)
Once clicked, I immediately realized my mistake. After the initial
embarrassment of inviting my whole world, I got over it as “oh well, my
mistake.”
However, no daily email spam is sent out to these contacts, harassing
that they join! Many unpleasant folks have contacted me and are very irritated
at me and fb!
I found a way in fb to remove all of these accidental
invites, but it conveniently doesn’t seem to work correctly.
The following process/path I used and the error that I was
confronted with:
facebook > friends > invite friends > View all
invitations > Select: Not Yet Joined
:: Popup Delete Entries? “Are you sure you want to delete these 100
entries from your Invitation History?” Delete
Oops!
“Something went wrong. We’re working on getting this
fixed as soon as we can. You may be able to try again.” OK
Could somebody else or a team of people, try hard to
improve this site with very simple enhancements?
Update: fb requires you delete these invites one by one. Deleted.
However, here it is a week later and the weekly fb spam has been sent
out to all of the formerly invited contacts again!!! What a joke!
Horrible business practice!!
Mac Homer and I are having the EXACT same problem. It has cost me over $50 in text messaging fees alone!! This issue MUST be fixed soon.