All The Facebook Platform Rules You’re Probably Violating

August 12th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

In an effort to clean up platform, Facebook established a new set of principles to guide the development of the platform going forward. A less inspiring necessity of the transition has been a laundry list of changes to the Facebook Platform Policy and Escalation Procedures. These new rules came into official effect noon yesterday.

As a side note, the platform policy procedures are the bare minimum rules applications must abide by in order to exist on Facebook. These are by no means the specifications developers should design their applications to. Although there will no doubt be opportunistic developers trying to get ahead by adhering to the letter of the law instead of aiming for the principles of the platform.

Here are some of the new rules that apply to most developers:

Incentivizing activity - This is probably the biggest change with the redesign. You can’t incentivize invitations of publishing to the feed. This means no more inviting friends for extra cash or to unlock new features. I’ve seen the larger applications follow this rule, however, smaller apps are still handing out gobs of virtual dollars to drive signups.

However, some apps are rewarding users for using the applications instead. But for those applications, using the app amounts to sending invites through things like kisses or hugs.

Asking for permission out of turn - The new FB redesign allows for some new points of integration, namely boxes and tabs. Developers can’t simply ask users to add these features all at once (i.e. asking to add boxes and tabs right after a user allows access to an application). It must be contextual, meaning that developers should use these permission forms only when users select the addition of the feature.

Feeds and Notifications - This is perhaps one of the grayest areas on platform. Facebook has described several guidelines for sending notifications and posting feed items. The general rule is that all notifications should be genuine and useful. Apps can’t pose as users and in most cases must reference actions that users took within the last hour. Application-to-user communications must contain aggregate information about multiple users or multiple actions.

This is somewhat gray with respect to notifications about the lack of action taken, such as not feeding your pet on Pokey. It also doesn’t stop trigger happy developers from reporting every action a user takes (some dating apps get really carried away. I even suspect some fake connections to generate activity). However, at least this is opt-in spam that users can shut off.

All in all, these new rules mark a healthy maturing of platform. More rules will likely follow to help clamp down on the opportunists as Facebook handles the hard work of managing the platform. All of these rules should be exceeded by any developer that wants to make application development into a real business.

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