Facebook: New Rules, Less Virality!

Yesterday facebook announced a new set of rules to go with the new profile design. Facebook is trying to limit some of the “spamminess” that it thinks some applications have. The concept is good; but I question the huge unknown area that they have created with these new rules.

Note to facebook: Don’t punish the village because of a few idiots.

From a recent blog post from facebook:
“Facebook is about empowering and connecting people through the sharing of information. That’s undermined if users who receive an invitation or other communication suspect it was sent for an ulterior motive, such as gaining points in a game. Similarly, because users represent themselves through their profile, they shouldn’t be goaded into adding a tab or other integration point just to see content they could have seen anyway, or in trade for some unrelated benefit.”

The many new rules apply to several areas but the most impact appears to be related to the Feed area.

1. Applications cannot include a call to action in a Feed story unless the call to action directly pertains to acting on or viewing content described in the story, or offers the opportunity to perform the same action described in the story.
2. Applications cannot submit a Feed story more than one hour after the completion of the oldest action referenced in the story or that was the trigger of the story.
3. Applications can generate a Feed story only when a user creates content or takes a significant action using the application.
4. A Feed story describing or triggered by the consumption of content must be a one-line story, and the content must have been requested by the user.
5. Applications cannot generate a Feed story triggered only by the user logging into the application or adding or authorizing an Application Integration Point.
6. Applications cannot incentivize users (for example, offer points, virtual or real payments, or a ranking) to publish stories to Feed.
7. Applications cannot require users to publish a story to Feed in order to interact with any portion of the application.
8. Applications cannot publish a Feed story for a user or display it in a Feed form until the user has completed the action described in the story.
9. After a user has completed an action, a Feed form for the action cannot be presented overlaying content the user has not yet viewed (as would happen if the Feed form is not presented until rolling to a new page).

The challenge that facebook has on their hands is great. They offer access to 80 million users; but companies that choose to try and leverage the opportunity are subjected to a never-ending set of rule set changes. These rule set changes could (and have) forced some businesses to choose to not embrace the facebook app platform. Making a business decision when the platform owner (facebook) can (and does) frequently change the rules is a serious business challenge.

For a full listing of all the new rules that apply to the facebook feed, application tabs, integration points and notifications area I suggest you study this.

The bottom line here is that the facebok rules are starting to feel more and more like the tax code. You know what happens when you have the tax code? You need an expert to navigate the waters. I am not saying the new rules are inherently bad; they just keep changing and getting much more complex.

I look forward to the Facebook F8 event to see what new stuff is coming out (think facebook connect) tomorrow.

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