The Facebook Spam Battle Continues
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 12th, 2008 9:56 AMLast night Facebook announced that they would begin using a new model for limiting application notifications. Applications are grouped into buckets and each of those buckets have a specific number of daily user notifications that they can send out. It appears that the default is now 15 notifications per user per day. This is a significant decrease from the initial level of 40 notifications per user per day for each application.
As time progresses it appears that Facebook is going to slowly cut a large portion of the virality of applications. While the goal is to combat spam, I have a feeling that applications are going to rapidly find it more challenging to attract a critical user base. Most applications will need to use advertising to obtain new installations. According to Tom Whitnah of Facebook:
The new system aims to provide users with more compelling notifications and fewer notifications that they are likely to ignore or consider spam. We hope this change incentivizes developers to improve the quality of their notifications and encourage their users to send notifications to interested friends.
In theory this makes sense but I’m not so sure about more compelling notifications. Right now applications are competing based on the volume of notifications but it appears that now it will be based on how compelling your notification is. Have you seen any compelling notifications thus far? Let me know if you do.
While the limits have not been turned on yet, developers can now access them via their application statistics panel. Developers can also via the number of notification spam reports that users have submitted for their application. I’m sure that the new ratios being used to track application spam will be adjusted regularly over the coming weeks and months. In the mean time expect the number of notifications flooding your profile to decrease substantially by the end of the week.
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Exactly, in the end we all want quality vs. quantity. They could easily cut this down even more by making it relational to grouped friends with a priority score attached to each group. Who cares if a friend of a friend of a friend did xyz with abc app.
I still believe that even though the old ones are running the show like you said that if a new one were to come in and do things better it wouldn't have to rely so much on viral activity as it's primary means for installs. Remember, there are a ton of crap applications, and there are reasons they don't spread.
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