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Facebook Updates Newsfeed Rules

Posted by Nick O'Neill on January 18th, 2008 4:22 PM

Facebook has announced significant changes to the newsfeed. This is part of their ongoing battle against spammy applications. As Ari Steinberg has posted on the Facebook developer blog, application must now only post active newsfeed stories. Stories such as “Nick has just been superpoked” will now longer be accepted. Instead, only actions taken by the user can be posted. This is going to have a significant impact on the numerous applications that have been taking advantage of the newsfeed for application promotions.

Those that use Facebook frequently have probably seen a few Flixster news feed items show up in their feed. Many of these newsfeed items will no longer be acceptable. Honestly, from a general user’s standpoint, many of these newsfeed stories do feel relatively spammy. One application developer I spoke with said that “a lot of apps must use passive news feeds but will not be allowed,” he continued to add that this will “be a disaster for several major apps.”

I’m not quite sure how large of an impact this will have on most applications but as I previously mentioned I think Flixster and SuperPoke will soon have a significant reduction in their volume of approved newsfeed items. Have you seen many spammy newsfeed stories? Do you think Facebook should be a little more lenient with developers? Has Facebook slowly turned the “viral dial” down too much?

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 4:22 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    Once again Facebook's strategy of closing off loopholes slowly has made it so that only the earliest apps can grow, not the first apps.

    I think it's a step in the right direction.. but I think they should hire some reviewers and make a directory of GOOD applications. Be selective. Not everybody can be a winner. But pick the best.
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    great, now can we have the same for people's mini-feeds? getting sick and tired of the superwall, uberwall, turbowall stuff...
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    This is a great step towards making the Facebook useful again. Before the app spam was allowed, the News Feed was a handy place allowed me to get the news about the actions generated by my "Friends".

    After the apps were unleashed and figured out that spam was the way to grow, my News Feed has turned into a whole bunch of Flixter notifications "that X challenged Y to take a movie quiz" with X and Y being any two random people from my friends list. Or that I received a video message from Z, even though I didn't.

    In short time, most of the content on my News Feed was app generated junk.

    After getting tired of Flixter producing this spam on my friends's feeds, I've uninstalled it, as well as all of the ****-walls. It's a shame, Flixter could be a useful community application but they shot themselves in the foot by being unscrupulous in their user acquisition tactics.

    The next great step would be if I could mute news about specific apps even if those actions were actually initiated by the users. I really don't care if someone turned vampire or became a pirate...

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