Facebook at War with Abusive Applications

Facebook is an incredibly rich communications medium.  It’s also ripe for exploitation by abusive applications.

TechCrunch reports that Facebook is cracking down on abusive Facebook applications. The first form of abuse are applications that install profile boxes that appear differently to the installing user than to his friends. The installing user sees something benign, but friends see a big yellow spam box that screams: “INSTALL THIS APPLICATION NOW!”.

The second form of abuse, relates to notification fraud. Just last night I ran into this with the My Questions application. After installation, it primed itself with a question I never asked “What’s your favorite drink?”. I asked no such thing and was annoyed that my friends would be bothered with such nonesense. Encouragingly, Facebook is cracking down on this form of abuse as well.  Here, however, they lack a technical fix.