I was responding to one of my many application invites when I noticed something new in my invitation to Mob Wars: A new option labeled “Stop These Invites”.

It seems that with every upgrade and iteration, Facebook is moving to slowly optimize the user’s Application experience. A big part of this is eliminating these spam-like invites, but another big part is emphasizing Application quality. Facebook has been moving with that initiative by assigning each Application an invitation quality rating, which either increases or decreases based on how many people respond positively to the invitation. This allows Applications with legitimate content to proliferate faster, and thereby increase the overall quality of the popular Application pool.

Furthermore, with the upcoming profile upheaval, we’ll see less room for Applications. This is certainly going to encourage developers to increase the aesthetic and functional appeal of their Applications, because real-estate will be at a premium. This also means that fewer applications will have the chance to become popular, and developers with multiple failed Applications will have no reason to jump in and create “Kiss Me Part VII”.

Eventually, the new profile page will facilitate Applications in a more organized way, with tabs enabling users to have precise control over groups of applications they’d like to display. This way, the most popular applications will reside in a tab right beside Photos, and to stay there, they’ll need to be as useful and usable as Photos itself.

I paint a somewhat ideal picture, and there will be a lot of bumps before Applications can jump to that level, but I do believe that eventually, Facebook will enable intelligent and creative third-party developers to generate software that is truly useful to the whole of Facebook.

[Edit: It's off-topic, but great reading relating to the business of Social Networks as mentioned in Tim's previous post.  This one is about the Profitability of Asian Social Networks vs. Facebook. ]

Tags: Social Network //