Facebook Spaminess

There's an interesting little debate going on in the Facebook Developer community regarding "spaminess". Spaminess is a term used to describe how spammy a Facebook application is to non-users.

A little background:

All applications have the ability to hook into the Facebook platform to do many tasks including getting information and posting information about a user (all using a REST interface, that in my opinion is not RESTful). Getting is pretty obvious: give me all the friends of a user, etc. Posting is a little different. You can post news stories, photos, notifications and invitations. The latter 2 are the points of interest.

A notification is a message usually saying something along the lines of "person x did thing y to you". It is almost always a personal message directed at the recipient. It can be sent to both users and non-users of an application.

An invitation is as it sounds...an invite to a non-user to add your application.

So where does spaminess fit in?

Here's the UI from the invite page:


Here's the UI from the notification page (with the little X pressed)


Notice any differences? I sure do, but Facebook doesn't seem to. So spaminess...as you can guess, if a non-app-user hits the little X button on the Notification page for your app, you get a spam marking for your app. If that happens enough your spaminess level rises, and you reach the Blocked status: no notifications will be sent to non-app-users... a.k.a. your app is ruined.

Why not just always send invites to non-users instead of notifications? The short and fun answer is that Facebook recently removed the ability to RESTfully post multiple invitations to users (like you can post multiple notifications to users). Instead, you can provide a button in a form that users can click to send an invitation to a single user.

According to this bug in the Facebook Developer area, Facebook is looking into the problem and will try to fix it. But for many developers, its a little too late. Our Christmas Fun! application has taken a huge hit in growth since this problem started to show up.