Facebook To Punish Stupid Apps

Very similar to Google's Quality Index, Facebook today announced that they will begin rolling out a system which rewards applications which appear to be more relevant to users, "based on a range of factors including the rates that users ignore, hide, and report notifications as spam".

Says Facebook:

"The new system aims to provide users with more compelling notifications and fewer notifications that they are likely to ignore or consider spam. We hope this change incentivizes developers to improve the quality of their notifications and encourage their users to send notifications to interested friends."

As someone to recently begin to use Facebook only a few months ago, I applaud this decision, as already the number of Feed updates and friends' applications requesting full control of my Profile seems more than a little out of control.

With a revamped system that promotes those apps that users actually use and punish the more spamlike apps which require -- as a very common example -- that you send the app to 10+ friends before the app will function, hopefully this will result in a social networking site that's far less cluttered with pure crap.

Now if only similar self-controls could begin to be implemented across all other channels, perhaps consumers could begin trusting marketers a little more than the "not at all" they're at right now.