Facebook: Weeding the app garden

I’m glad to hear that Facebook is looking at ways of fine-tuning its growing garden of apps and widgets (or perhaps jungle might be a better word). According to Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWrite Web, the social network is tweaking the way that apps and widgets can send updates or alerts in the site’s newsfeeds. In effect, Facebook will let apps that have a good success rate — that is, either new installs or clickthroughs on their existing events — send out more, and those that fail to pass those tests will be restricted in the number of alerts they can send out.

A post on the Facebook developer blog says that apps were previously restricted to an upper limit of 40 notifications per day. I think this move could have a couple of different outcomes: On the one hand, it should cut down on a lot of the noise that shows up in Facebook’s newsfeeds, about people becoming Zombies or rating different movies, or taking this or that quiz. But at the same time, it will increase the likelihood that a “good” app becomes even more successful, since it will get a correspondingly larger share of the newsfeed event market.

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