Changes In Facebook Platform Aim To Control ‘Bad’ Applications
The Facebook F8 platform is still young and thus has some kinks to work out. Already, abusive applications have been developed that spam both you and your friends should you add them to your profile. Facebook is beginning to take steps to prevent such behavior with some changes to the F8 platform.
A blog post from Dave Morin on the Facebook developer???s site claims ???with the upcoming changes, we hope to shift the balance more in favor of good apps.??? He goes on to add ???we will continue to block applications which behave badly and we will continue to iterate on our automated spam detection tools.???
Under the updated platform, apps will no longer be able to put an ???Add this app??? button in your user profile without the developer???s agreement to it being displayed. Additionally, e-mail functionality is being removed from the notifications.send method of the Facebook API in an attempt to eliminate misleading notifications and spam. For the time being, Facebook says developers will have to do without e-mail notification functionality, though Facebook intends to add a safer version back in at some point.
Other changes include making it impossible for applications to hide things from profile owners. Some mischievous developers had been using this feature to serve ads to your friends when they view your profile page, but then hide the ads from you when you look at the same page.
The other major change is a new interface for inviting your friends to use an app. Under the changes, the invite friends portion of an application will offer more fine-grained controls over which friends the app sends requests to.
Regrettably, the changes still don’t provide an API to pull your data out of Facebook and use it elsewhere.
