Facebook Continues to Cut Down on Spam
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 6th, 2008 12:14 PMLast night Facebook announced that they would start cutting down on the number of application notifications available each day. According to Tom Whitnah, “the number of notifications per application will be based on a range of factors including the rates that users ignore, hide, and report notifications as spam.” I’ve been speaking with a number of application developers recently who agree with my observation that users are become less receptive to application requests and notifications.
This is a problem for those applications that actually have useful content to display to users. To help developers understand the new changes, Facebook will be providing new metrics that enable them to track “their current per user notification threshold as well as metrics on notifications that they can use to understand how users are responding.” Currently, Facebook is the only platform that provides useful statistics to their developers for free. These metrics are going to become increasingly relevant as applications try not to get drowned by the noise.
That noise has been increasing rapidly as the platform has grown to around 15,400 applications. Facebook is months ahead of the other platforms in battling spam but there is still a long way to go in perfecting the system. You can be confident that the other platforms will be watching every step Facebook takes and adjust their platform as needed. Have you become immune to Facebook notifications and requests?
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February 6th, 2008 at 11:23 am
about time. there are groups on facebook with membership in the thousands for people who are sick of application invite through group mail outs. and some people are expressing their view using their status update, saying 'john is sick of getting zoombie/jedi/whatever invites' .
should have happened quicker i think
February 6th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
about time. there are groups on facebook with membership in the thousands for people who are sick of application invite through group mail outs. and some people are expressing their view using their status update, saying ‘john is sick of getting zoombie/jedi/whatever invites’ .
should have happened quicker i think
February 6th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I even made an app that lets you invite people to tell them to stop sending you apps!
I found it in a pile of irony that somebody left lying on the sidewalk.
February 6th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
It's exactly the move that we've been waiting for (those of us who are sick of the good apps having so much difficulty getting exposure). I hope it works out as planned.
February 6th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I even made an app that lets you invite people to tell them to stop sending you apps!
I found it in a pile of irony that somebody left lying on the sidewalk.
February 6th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
It’s exactly the move that we’ve been waiting for (those of us who are sick of the good apps having so much difficulty getting exposure). I hope it works out as planned.