Zambia’s minister of education, Dora Siliya, has lately been using her Facebook profile to announce important policy changes in the government. Siliya is also the spokesperson of the political party that is in power right now, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy.
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What exactly was the reason for LOLapps having their applications shut down on Friday morning? According to a company blog post, it was due to the transmission of Facebook user IDs to third parties, an issue which the Wall Street Journal is heralding as a massive privacy breach. Fortunately for LOLapps, the apps are back, however developers are left wondering why LOLapps had their applications pulled, yet Zynga and other top developers didn’t.
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On Friday, the same day that “Operation Developer Love” was announced, Facebook shut down all LOLapps applications. While the two events were not related, the timing was nothing short of ironic.
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Facebook has been ramping up their D.C. office pretty consistently over the past couple years and today they announced that they’ve hired Marne Levine as their new Vice President of global public policy. Levine previously served as the White House economic advisor. I guess she figured that with the economy going so well, it was time to make the jump! (Sarcasm) According to the Washington Post, Levine “will oversee the company’s interaction with governments and non-governmental organizations around the globe”.
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While the majority of top application developers have realized that misleading users is not a long-term business plan, a small portion of developers continue to strive to use every aggressive tactic possible to gain users. While Facebook continues to monitor Platform activity, there are still a number of applications which continue to fall through the cracks. In a matter of days, some of these applications drive millions of users which are then converted into the standard IQ Quiz conversion funnel.
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If you had any question as to those Facebook ad networks that developers can run on their applications, question no longer. Yesterday evening Facebook posted an update with those ad networks which are safe to run and those that aren’t, in turn singling out four ad networks: Gambit, Social Hour, SocialReach, and Tatto Media. We’ve written extensively about most of these networks, however the latest added to the group is Gambit, something we had been hearing for the past couple weeks.
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This afternoon, Facebook posted that the new developer terms, as discussed at the Palo Alto Developer Garage at Facebook Headquarters last month, will go into effect starting December 16th. The new terms, which are the standards originally set forth in through the Application Verification Program, are being integrated intro the new Developer Priciples and Policies and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Facebook has gone ahead and highlighted the changes and clarifications.
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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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