Recently, I’ve talked about a new kind of social worm and useless/annoying Facebook apps, all are about built-in rival marketing functionality and unclear policies on responsibility of Facebook applications.

In an effort to strengthen Facebook Platform policies, the Facebook Platform team has created two new pages on the Developer Wiki which are a must-read for those who want to succeed on creating Facebook apps.

First, the Platform Policy page that expresses Facebook’s philosophy on user experience, spells out the rules developers must follow, and explains the (possible) penalizing actions Facebook can take against rule breaking.

List of what apps are NOT allowed to do:

1. Generate any notification, request, invitation, News Feed story, Mini-Feed story, profile box content, or message on behalf of a user that misrepresents that user’s activity in any way. All representations of action taken by a user must correspond to actions a user has initiated within your application.
2. Represent themselves or any features of the application as Facebook, such as using Facebook product terms like “wall” or “message” to refer to something other than Facebook’s functionality of the same name, unless there is an agreement in writing to the contrary.
3. Express or imply any affiliation or relationship with or endorsement by Facebook.
4. Contain anything designed to mislead, confuse, or defraud the user in any way.
5. Present a user with a subsequent friend invite page if the user has already clicked a Facebook-rendered Skip, Cancel, or Skip This Step button, unless the user explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than just the friend invite option. If the application presents the user with a friend invite page that does not include a Facebook-rendered Skip, Cancel, or Skip This Step button, the application must offer some navigation option to leave the friend invite process, and the application must not present the user with a subsequent friend invite page unless the user explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option.
6. Include JavaScript actions pretending to be user actions.
7. Track visits to a user’s profile, whether aggregated anonymously or identified individually.
8. Contain functionality that exceeds the dimensions of the canvas page.
9. Publish stories in which the user is a passive actor. The user must be the person performing the action in order to generate a story about that user. In technical terms, this means the feed.publishTemplatizedAction API method ignores the actor_id parameter and uses the session key to generate the feed story.
10. Promote other applications in notifications in order to pool notifications together and work around the limit of 20 notifications per user per application each day.
11. Put links into feed stories and notifications that trick users into installing another application.
12. Tag images, nor encourage users to tag images, when the tag does not accurately label what is depicted in the image.
13. Store API data about a user unless the the application clearly gives the user the choice to submit the data, and the user agrees. It must be made clear to the user prior to submission that this data will be stored by the application/developer, and not by Facebook.
14. Use another user’s session key when making a call to the Facebook Platform API. You must use the session key of a user who is actively using the application.

In addition, Facebook sent out a letter to all developers reminding the (5) item in its Platform Policy:

Dear developer,

Your application has been temporarily restricted from using requests/invites. This is because users of your application get trapped in a UI interaction for inviting friends.

If the user clicks the Facebook-rendered buttons “Skip” , “Cancel” , or “Skip This Step” , he must not be re-presented with an invite friends UI unless he explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option. If you use another UI that does not have one of these buttons rendered by Facebook, the application must offer some other navigation option to leave the invite friends process, and the user must not be re-presented with an invite friends UI unless he explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option.

If you correct this aspect of your application, the moratorium will be lifted. Please respond to this email once you have made the necessary changes and please include your application id for verification purposes.

If you wish to correspond, please reply to this message.

Thank you,

Facebook Platform Developer Operations & Support

Second, the Best Practices page which proposes guidance for architecting, designing, branding, cross promoting, and monetizing Facebook apps. Please check out:

• Facebook Platform Basics
• Engineering Best Practices – Technical Tips
• Engineering Best Practices – Design Tips
• Monetization Best Practices
• Promoting your Application
• Branding your Application

We cannot expect low-quality apps will evaporate immediately but they will find harder to spread out without explicit user’s suggestion. However, this is an impressive step by Facebook and I think that users will welcome this new change.

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