Facebook punishes/rewards applications
2 Comments Published by Rodney Rumford February 12th, 2008 in Facebook, Facebook Applications.
Facebook punishes/rewards apps: What’s in your bucket? Facebook has changed the notification limits that can be sent on a users behalf from within an application based on how well the notifications are received by the participants. This is a new rule set that will limit an applications ability to grow virally in some areas (this has been exploited by some large apps and feels sort of spammy to many facebook users).
To improve the Facebook Platform user experience and to reward compelling applications, facebook will be rolling out a feedback-based system that allots notifications in proportion to user response. Applications will no longer have a static upper limit of 40 notifications per user per day.
Per Facebook: “Based on the affinity users show for your application’s use of Facebook Platform through their interactions, your application is allocated certain abilities and limits. This is the functionality currently allocated to your application. These values will change over time depending on how users interact with your application. All integration points have a set of limit values and the threshold bucket column tells you which of these limits buckets your application is in for that integration point. Bucket 1 is the smallest allocation bucket. Bucket 9 is the greatest.”
It would appear that most apps start at a bucket level 5. Neutral.
Additionally: The feedback-based allocation reporting mentioned in last week’s developer blog post is now available under the Insights statistics page. There are two tabs:
1. Allocations: Shows the current number of notifications that can be sent on behalf of a user per day.
2. User Response: Shows the rates that users have marked notifications as spam and hid notifications over the past 7 days.
Though these numbers are exposed to developers, the limits will not be turned on till later in the week. Tomorrow night we will be providing an API function that provides an application with its current allocation. It will return the same number seen in the Insights tab.
App developers will need to pay attention to this as the value and limits will change on the fly. I can already foresee clients thinking their app is broke and not working properly when notification daily limits are hit. This constraint is quite possibly a very good thing. But I worry that the ecosystem is becoming intensely rule laden and almost starting to feel like the tax code. 
Ah… the secret notification bucket algorithm that is not yet totally transparent. It will reward/punish you based on user behaviors. What are the thresholds for determining which bucket level I get for my app and how often will it change levels? Facebook app development and growth optimization is like walking a tightrope.
2 Responses to “Facebook punishes/rewards applications”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 29th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Rodney,
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Amen… but it has always been thus.
Develop for quality or for viral growth? Game the system or serve the user? Choose tight platform integration over driving traffic off premise?
These may be “false choices” and not mutually exclusive.
My point is this: Facebook has always presented challenges in that sometimes bad behavior (spamminess, deception, etc.) is rewarded by increased traffic, over applications that actually provide real utility, user benefit, and “play by the rules”… and when the hue and cry becomes loud enough, Facebook changes the game yet again – but only after the damage has been done.
I would be happy with a stable platform and a set of guidelines that didn’t change every couple of weeks. Some of us actually need to make money doing creating these applications, and it is a tremendous time waster each week fixing things that break beyond our control because Facebook changes the rules and ecosystem arbitrarily.
David