There’s an increasingly complicated situation spreading through the Facebook platform. The best way of explaining it is by looking back over a year and a half ago when the platform first launched. As many remember, the early days of the platform was the wild west and pretty much anything went. Developers instantly had millions of users and Facebook wasn’t taking any action to stop their growth.
Within a short period of time, Facebook began cracking down. It started with limitations on invitations and then restrictions against applications that were incentivizing invites. As users’ profiles became cluttered with countless applications, Facebook decided that it was time to redesign the platform. Granted, the whole redesign was not just due to Facebook’s desire to avoid cluttered profiles but also as a way for the company to increase ad impressions on the thousands of applications.
Facebook implemented a number of restrictions to avoid “abuse” by developers and gave the impression that a new sheriff was in town. Many saw their applications decline in traffic following the new redesign but over the past few weeks there has been a resurgence in applications that have violated the terms of service and have used spammy techniques to rapidly attract a large user base.
This has put many large developers in an awkward predicament. Facebook has consistently regulated many of the large application developers that have built relationships with the company. Often times it can be small modifications that are requested. It makes it difficult for those that try to abide by Facebook’s terms of service when smaller developers can get hundreds of thousands of users within days.
Ultimately it’s forcing many large developers to reconsider whether or not they should return to their old aggressive ways. At the end of the day, many of the spam applications are getting banned but I would argue that Facebook’s desire to support applications which “add value” to the user’s experience hasn’t been accomplished.
One of the fastest growing applications today is called “Super Snowball Fight!” I previously wrote about how Snowball Wars was spamming users and was eventually shut down. Developers can continue to use the same spamming techniques time and time again, gain a ton of pageviews, get shut down, and repeat the process. It has created an interesting dilemma for developers who are now forced to reconsider whether or not they should adopt an overly aggressive strategy to acquire new users.
According to some developers I’ve spoken to, testing spam-like strategies is already under way by some large platform developers. Do you think Facebook should get aggressive on platform spammers or should developers get more aggressive to compete in this new environment?
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Facebook should do two general things:
(1) Ban not just bad apps but the developers behind them. It could be done on a “three strikes, you’re out” or some such basis, so that the people who get banned are repeat offenders. Yes, there are ways around such bans, but they have real costs. Right now, as far as I know, there’s no cost for developers of banned apps—they can come right back and do it again. (If I’m mistaken, and Facebook does indeed ban developers, they should certainly publicize it better.)
(2) Educate users. Facebook should use all the channels at its disposal, which are numerous and powerful, to get the following idea into users’ heads: if an app does something you don’t like, delete it! Report it too, if you like, but mainly, delete it. Examples could be provided of things users shouldn’t tolerate, such as “incentivized” invites. It’s remarkable how little Facebook has done along these lines.
As a developer who plays by the rules, I’m sick of dealing with all the officiousness Facebook put into their platform last year in the name of protecting users from bad apps. Some of these restrictions don’t even prevent what they’re trying to prevent—they can be worked around—so all they do is make life less pleasant for good developers as well as bad ones. It’s high time for a new approach.
Incidentally, unless Facebook gets serious about educating users, the new “Verified Apps” program will accomplish very little.
Comment by Ralph Haygood — February 4, 2009 @ 6:46 pm
Nick-
Thanks for your post, calling out what is definitely an important issue with Facebook Platform.
Just to give some background – our Platform is focused around giving developers tools to create engaging applications that help users share and connect more with each other. As we’ve seen over the past 1.5 years, our social communication channels allow users to share and receive information from their friends in increasingly rapid fashion and messages, content, and apps spread faster than ever before. In an ideal world, users would be encouraged by developers to share information such that it’s always trusted and both intended by the sender or sharer of information and well-received by the recipient. In that case, this idea of “enforcement” or “spam” wouldn’t have to exist. But unfortunately, sometimes developers do seem to put their interests over users and encourage or execute spammy behavior that is fake and/or unwanted by the sender or recipient — a situation that’s prevalent on or off the Web and not unique to Facebook. This has serious impact on our entire ecosystem and risks eroding the trust in applications and developers for everyone.
In order to mitigate this, we take enforcement of our terms and policies very seriously. Over the past several months, there have been thousands of applications suspended and permanently disabled when they have violated these basic rules and norms. We don’t take this lightly, and only do this when necessary to protect the entire ecosystem from bad actors. When an application is disabled, it no longer has access to any information on the users who had engaged with the application. From time to time, we go further and block developers who have been banned from building new applications as well. The stats we’re seeing and what we hear from users and developers show that the Platform ecosystem is healthy. That said, it’s disappointing if you’re hearing developers may still consider this a means to their ends. We’ll continue to work vigorously to ensure that those developers are rooted out and will be shut down rapidly and not receive the benefits of ill-gotten gains.
As Ralph points out, there’s a lot more that we can do here as well besides just enforcing. We are working to continue improving our tools and APIs so developers can do the right things and grow easily and effectively, and educate users how to best use applications and share them with friends. We appreciate everyone’s continued vigilance and rejection of spam and bad practices as we work together to continue making the web more social.
Thanks,
Josh Elman
Facebook Platform Team
Comment by Facebook User — February 5, 2009 @ 9:52 pm