Facebook Disables Some Apps

Facebook's been on a little trip lately. First, news of Project Spartan comes out. Then credits becomes the only way to use money on the Facebook site sparking antitrust concerns. Now, they just shut down apps. Over the last few days, Facebook has been shutting down apps, reportedly without any notification to its developers. The shutdown affected mostly smaller apps with more than ten thousand daily active users like Photo Effect, GoodReads and Social Interview. In all cases, developers weren't notified and have expressed their outrage on Facebook itself, as well as Facebook forums.Some apps have been reinstated, but most haven't. GoodReads, a shutdown app A Facebook engineer explained the shutdown as Facebook taking user responses for spam more strongly. "We’ve been getting a lot of user feedback recently, spiking significantly over the past week, on the amount of application spam people are seeing in their feeds and on their walls. We turned on a new enforcement system yesterday that took user feedback much more heavily into account. This resulted in a number of applications with high negative user feedback being disabled or having certain features disabled. In particular, many applications were disabled which posted to the walls of other users and had very high mark-as-spam numbers. My apologies for the suddenness of the action. The numbers were high enough to cause a real loss of trust in applications, which can impact the entire platform. Where we have failed is not providing enough feedback about negative engagement metrics to developers before needing to take this action. This is something we are working hard to fix with the new Application Insights that will be launching over the next few weeks - you will have detailed information about both positive and negative engagement of the content your application generates."