Following its meeting with developers yesterday, Facebook announced some changes it will be making to its homepage. As expected, one of the biggest changes is an attempt to fight application spam.
Notifications from apps that you sign up for are being curtailed so that you can opt to only see those notifications that your friends explicitly send to you. That should get rid of all those random updates about Joey sending some virtual bananas as a gift to someone else you don’t care about. Facebook will also allow users to specify which applications may contact them via email and for what purposes, much like when you register for any Website and they ask you if they can send you marketing newsletters.
Applications, however, will be easier to access. An “Applications” link will appear in the left-hand navigation column. Clicking on that will show you all of your Facebook apps. And in a sign that shows the growing importance of social games in Facebook, “Games” will get their own link in the left-hand dashboard, even though they are a kind of app. Games are special that way.
I hope this applies to those stupid “If you were a rock, what kind of rock would you be?” polls. I get tired of the wack-a-mole process of disappearing those things before they proliferate.
It’s nice that they’ve finally realized how irritating the constant stream of app notifications are.
Maybe someday I won’t need my greasemonkey scripts to clean up the news feed.
Thank god for Greasemonkey.
And it’s about damn time they do something. I am tired of feeling guilty for playing Mafia Wars.
There was a piece a while back about how Facebook was making it easy to “clone” an app, like the Quiz applications.
The good news there was that hiding a quiz would also hide all of the “children” of that quiz – less whack-a-mole.
yh we really need something like this
I agree with most of this!!!! This should clean up the news aggregator quite a bit. If it can be tweaked, I think we can get our old news back, minus the “junk”. I would love to see a friend priority (the higher the priority, the more likely I’ll see it in the news). I’m already missing stuff because of all the junk!
Sweet. I was annoyed over facebook for its constant app spam. Now must of it will hopefully be over!
FB is also (quietly – I’ve only seen it spread from user to user) offering a “lite” version of the site that allows one to avoid seeing all apps, YouTube links and the rest of the junk. lite.facebook.com – and you can set it as your default.
I know you guys are working on it but I really do miss the old way. I am sure we will live with what ever you do.
Explicitly send as in… seemingly harmless joking button, but when clicked then the game had all the privilage it needs to spam your friends until you realized it.
Just look at the Tribes War OAuth problem in Twitter.
It was just as easy to click on “hide updates from this application” previously. These changes from Facebook have more to do with pushing app companies to promote via paid ads by taking away viral marketing tools, than it does with improving user experience.
its great pleasure
they seem to have removed the “hide application” links now, whats going on… ?