16 February 2008, by Karl Bunyan
The Facebook application world has recently been plagued by a slightly underhand practice of forcing users to invite friends to an application in order to access information. 
The Facebook application world has recently been plagued by a slightly underhand practice of forcing users to invite friends to an application in order to access information. Often, this has taken the form of a quiz where the user is asked a series of questions and then, before being shown their result, must invite 10 or 20 friends. At this point the user has already spent time in the application and may continue by spamming their friends or, as many have been doing, joined groups and complained to Facebook about the practice.
It seems that Facebook is taking note and may start to clamp down on applications that implement this practice. This notice on the Facebook Developers pages outlines the main approach, and more explicit detail is written in the platform policy.
February 16, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Filed in: Sales & Marketing, Programming
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8 February 2008, by Karl Bunyan
I attended the MySpace developer platform launch last night and it was quite interesting not only to see how the platform will work but also by how MySpace's approach seems to be differing from Facebook
I attended the MySpace developer platform launch last night and it was quite interesting not only to see how the platform will work (which can be be determined to a certain extent from the developer documentation) but also by how MySpace’s approach seems to be differing from Facebook which, after all, does have both the advantages and disadvantages of being a first-mover.
For a start, there seemed to be much more effort to engage with the developer community. Whether this is real or for show, given a percieved shortfall of Facebook in this area and an opportunity to capitalise on the reaction, is impossible to tell. On the one hand taking the approach of letting the developers see things early is good, but on the other we don’t want to be seen as guinea pigs helping MySpace iron out all the kinks in their beta at our expense. Perhaps I’m cynical but I’ll keep the jury out for the moment.
As an example: even the London development team for MySpace had only had a few days visibility of the platform before having to attend the launch events and try and talk meaningfully about possibilities. That’s quite fast moving by anybody’s standards, although I do hope they don’t fall into the trap of “release, test, patch and re-release” that Facebook’s platform seems to do.
The platform itself is different from Facebook but the main components are very similar: profile boxes, canvas pages, but (and this is extremely interesting) there is also a new component of the homepage box. This is a limitation of Facebook applications in that it’s actually quite hard for an application to tell a user about things they might be interested in. To see an app, they need to look at their own profile page, or click through to the application itself. Now I don’t know about everyone but I don’t look at my own profile that often. Being able to put something in front of the user as soon as they log in as MySpace will could be very powerful. Facebook may adopt this too, although perhaps not as it could lead to a cluttered page (which, after all, seems to be all well and good for MySpace but Facebook is much more controlling).
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the platform itself is still rather buggy and can’t quite be considered even a beta version yet. However it certainly all looks promising. Whether MySpace users will take to applications in the same way as Facebook users I can’t say yet, but it’s going to be worth some experimentation.
February 8, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Filed in: Sales & Marketing, Programming
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