Facebook is getting aggressive with a few developers who have been abusing the platform. Today the company alerted us to a “substantial” policy enforcement against the developers behind My Calendar, one of the largest Facebook applications. MyCalendar has been temporarily disabled and hundreds of other applications have been permanently shut down. According to Facebook, the developers have been engaging in misleading and spammy tactics in order to get more users rather than building valuable experiences.
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Yesterday morning Facebook announced changes to their Site Governance documents which as a number of people pointed out removed the ability of users to profit from their status updates. More specifically Facebook states that “you will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain”. While I’m assuming that this is supposed to be straight forward about selling things through your Facebook profile, part of me wonders why Facebook needed to make this explicit statement.
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Digg is one of the most significant implementations of Facebook Connect to date but not everything is rosy as Digg has violated Facebook’s terms in the process of rolling out their service. One month ago a developer in the Facebook developer forum began complaining that Digg was actively storing user information. One month later Matt Trainer who handles developer relations at Facebook posted that they’ve “followed up with Digg to make sure that no profile information is stored against Facebook policy.”
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Facebook posted their updated advertising terms last night and ultimately nothing was really that surprising. As far as I can tell, the only addition to the terms was around data and privacy. As previously was the case, developers cannot give any data received from Facebook to any third party. Additionally advertisements that include user data “such as users’ names or profile pictures” will require explicit authorization from Facebook.
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The past two years have been an interesting ride as the Facebook Platform has become more restricted in order to protect the user’s experience. When Facebook first opened up there were countless ad networks and developers looking to seize the opportunity to make millions. Many have generated large sums of cash and a few continue to be extremely profitable to this day but what has been most interesting is watching Facebook carefully navigate the gray policy areas.
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This afternoon Facebook posted an update to their blog regarding the viral note circulating around the web about third-party ad networks. According to their post, the company is concerned about the user experience and so far they have shut down two ad networks (as we have previously written) and have forced some ad networks to remove the deceptive ads previously in question. The most important component of their blog post is as follows:
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With the massive backlash that took place following the Consumerist article about Facebook’s temporarily modified terms of service (which was eventually set back to the original terms), you would have thought more people cared about how the new terms would be written. It’s clear that the majority of users only care once Facebook crosses the line but until they do, most users could care less about the terms.
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One of the biggest problems with Facebook’s platform for developers is the limits placed on them. Whether it’s a limit on the number of invites they can send, a limit on the types of emails they can send users, there are many restrictions. Today one of those restrictions have been loosened and developers can “now incorporate a number of HTML tags so” they can format messages as they wish.
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This evening, Facebook announced a new set of demographic targeting features that will enable developers to limit users that view specific content. Developers may limit viewership based on age and location. With these restrictions comes a policy update which enables alcoholic beverages to be promoted. As the blog post today states:

We plan to modify this policy to permit promotion of content around the sale of alcohol, provided that you specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.

There have already been a number of applications shut down for the promotion of alcohol and it is no secret that alcohol companies are desperate to get on to Facebook. Most likely because one of the largest demographics for the site is college students. Does that mean that Facebook is going to start alcohol promotions in the near future? I don’t see why not.

Alcohol companies spend billions on advertising, so I’d guess that we’ll see many more beer and liquor ads in the near future. Perhaps Facebook will start to feel like spring break! If you’d like more details on the demographic restrictions check out the wiki page.