Facebook Shuts Down Dozens Of Apps
Late last week Facebook's automated monitoring system began shutting down a large number applications for message spam. Many apps with tens of thousands of daily active users had gone mostly unnoticed as Facebook focuses its attention on much larger apps like Zynga with millions of daily users. That's changed, and some of the larger apps shut include Photo Effect, Social Interview, and Good Reads, although many more are have been blocked. Over the weekend Facebook tried to explain:
"Over the past year, we’ve worked hard to improve our automated systems that catch spam and malicious behavior on the platform. These systems allowed us to cut spam on the platform by 95 percent in 2010, greatly increasing user satisfaction and trust with apps on Facebook. Recently, we started getting a lot of user feedback, spiking significantly over the past week, on the amount of application spam people are seeing in their feeds and on their walls. As a result, we turned on a new enforcement system yesterday that took user feedback much more heavily into account. This resulted in a number of applications with high negative user feedback being disabled or having certain features disabled. We’ve posted a link for developers where they can appeal if they feel they’ve been disabled in error. Also, we’re working on new analytics to help developers better monitor negative user feedback to prevent a spike like this in the future.”
Let us know any music related app shut down in the Facebook crackdown.
I wish Facebook would shut down even more applications. Some of my friends’ Facebook walls are so overwhelmed by spam (like the rapidly multiplying quizzes) that you can’t see what they have posted on their own walls. The legitimate posts get pushed so far down the page, all you see when you visit their Facebook sites are spam posts.
Sure, there are ways to block the posts, but if people aren’t monitoring their Facebook walls all the time, it can get away from them. They delete a series of spam posts in the morning and a few hours later there are more of them. And not all of them know how to block applications.
I mark spam whenever I see it — either in my own news feed or when I see it on people’s walls. But it only removes it from my sight. It doesn’t remove it from their walls. Only they can do that.
Spam killed MySpace. The noise level got so bad there it wasn’t worth visiting anymore. The same will happen with Facebook if the company doesn’t get this under control.