Yesterday Facebook shut down a fourth application in its continuing campaign against applications violating their terms of service. What exactly has been violated is not clear. One strategy used by the SpeedDate application was to purchase other applications and proceed to switch each application to be a duplicate of the original SpeedDate application. The result was that some users would be surprised when one of their applications had now switched their profile to show something related to SpeedDating.

Technically this was not against the Facebook terms of service and it may not be the source of contention with the Facebook team. Then again, approximately 10 applications have already been acquired and converted to SpeedDate. Emails were also sent out to each of those users trying to attract them to register for the SpeedDate application which is run by SpeedDate.com. There are no exact details on what exactly happen but it appears that within hours the application was back up and running.

These shut downs by Facebook are making many developers antsy. There are clearly a large group of developers that are skirting around the terms to help grow their applications. In fact, pushing the limits on the terms was pretty much a standard of practice when the platform first launched. It’s how the top applications grew to become top applications in the first place. It’s clear that a new sheriff is in town at Facebook and they are starting to crack down hard.

Developers that built their mini-empires on top of loose policies are now becoming skittish. Will they be the next application to be shut down? Will they receive a warning letter at 3 AM in the morning and have hours to fix their application? It’s clear that this trend will continue over the coming weeks. My advice to developers: don’t push the limits, it’s time to play by the rules not bend them.