Wednesday, July 23, 2008
f8: Great Apps, No Crap
Looks like Facebook has finally gotten around to addressing the issue of the intrusive third-party applications so prevalent in its ecosystem. “We haven’t done enough to reward Facebook’s good citizens,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during his f8 keynote address Wednesday. “And we haven’t punished those that have abused the Facebook ecosystem.”
With that in mind, the company is incentivizing developers to create useful applications with its new Great Apps program. Great Apps, Ben Ling, head of Facebook Platform Product Marketing says, recognizes applications that are meaningful, trustworthy and well-designed. Apps that hew to Facebook’s “Guiding Principles for Great Applications” (see image below)–they must be “social, useful, engaging, expressive, secure, respectful, transparent, clean, fast and robust”–will be given greater visibility across the site and early access to new features. The first apps to be awarded that status: iLike and Causes.
Facebook, it should be noted, plans to aggressively police its site for apps that abuse user trust and will take “enforcement actions” if necessary.
