However, the incessant spam and constant barrage of useless applications quickly led to a backlash among users. More importantly, it led to apathy from developers who became disincentivized to create anything worthwhile as study by Jesse Farmer points out. Social networks quickly realized that to keep their platforms a viable ecosystem, they had to provide value for all participants from developers to end users. Recently, the most stringent ant-spam measures to date have been announced by MySpace and Facebook.

Introduced in a post by Tom of MySpace himself, the new terms state:

No incentives may be given to a member for sending a message, bulletin, comment, or any other form of communication. This includes “points,” “bucks,” increased standing, or even features within the app.

Facebook’s guidelines have been changed to explicitly include:

[Applications cannot] require that users invite, notify, or otherwise communicate with one or more friends to gain access to any feature, information, or portion of the application.

While these new policies will inhibit the growth of spammy apps and improve the environment on various platforms, it’s unlikely that it will help with another complaint about social apps, that so-called “useful” applications aren’t successful. People will still want games and social interaction not office productivity apps.

But usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. Who’s to say that entertaining someone for 20 minutes or facilitating hook-ups are not useful in their own way? After all, procreation is one of the most important functions that any organism can perform, or as Nick O’Neill more eloquently puts it, “Social Apps Should Get You Laid.”

Instead reality set in quite quickly after the platform launched and the much vaunted openness of the social graph allowed it to become a morass of zombie hugs and super pokes with dozens of invites and notices filling every home page. People began ignoring them outright and these things became running gags about how much useless garbage was on Facebook. Even MySpace, the poster child of glitter text and webcam girl invites, differentiated itself from Facebook when it announced its platform, claiming it would “avoid the feed spam issues that have plagued ‘other players in the space’”.

Unfortunately, the letter of new policy still allows forced invites; users just have to be told about them upfront and given a way out rather than ambushed and trapped. And various technical limitations won’t change the essence of the types of applications that become popular.

What are the things that are popular on Facebook and likely will be on other platforms and social networks? They are difficult to categorize, but some successful characteristics can be identified:

• Things that facilitate cool self-expression or personal representation
• Things that help pass time in an entertaining way
• Things that help people flirt or hookup
• Things with vaguely illicit or titillating content
• Things that leverage the fan base of something already popular

So given a blank slate, it’s kind of easy to pick two or three and combine them into something with mass appeal: send naughty pokes to friends, put favorite sports teams logos on your profile, play a knock-off of well-known game.

Legal rights and ethical issues aside, the challenge is that the application landscape on Facebook is now very crowded. It was one thing for these types of apps to spread virally when there were a few hundred and no limitations on communication with users and quite another when then are over 16,000 and tight restrictions.

A key question now when developing a new app is whether to try to gain the more difficult mass appeal or to create something more tightly targeted to a smaller, but perhaps more loyal and relevant user base. This is especially pertinent to applications created as part of marketing for brands. Should an app provide utility directly related to a brand or should it be something only tangentially connected with the potential to reach more people?

Unfortunately, success on Facebook is currently primarily measured by total reach with more users always being better. This is what has led to the spam mess in the first place. Maybe with the new changes, there will be a trend towards an appreciation of quality over quantity. I certainly hope so.

Update:
All Facebook and TechCrunch have interesting articles on Facebook spam.