Currently, Facebook has limited the use of profile feeds by developers to 10 stories per day. Yesterday while testing out a few applications I realized how completely flawed this is. For example, I was using the MTV Music Videos application and realized that everytime I listen to a video, that is an activity that my friends should be notified of.

FriendFeed, the popular activity aggregation tool, makes sure to publish all of your activities and then provides a filter of your network’s activities based on a number of factors. Facebook performs a similar service and when you view your main news feed on the Facebook home page, this is a highly filtered set of news stories. The reason that Facebook limits application feed activity makes sense, they want to filter out application spam.

Facebook already filters out hundreds of stories daily and display the ones that they believe are most important based on their custom algorithm. The news feed filter is what’s of most value for Facebook and as such they should accept as many stories as possible so that they can improve their story filtering algorithm. This would also benefit applications as they get to publish all of a user’s activities.

How would Facebook be able to verify that a user took an action? Easy, Facebook simply needs to verify that some sort of request variable has been posted from the previous page. I believe they already do this for many of the API calls which currently have restrictions. Do you have any problems with news feed spam? Would you benefit from having more stories published about your activities?