Tonight, Facebook changed the viral channel limits for application developers, making it harder for spammy app developers to keep growing and rewarding developers with good user feedback ratings with more opportunity for growth.

The changes apply to requests (invitations) and notifications. Depending on user feedback ratings on your apps’ requests and notifications, applications sending high-quality messages through these viral channels will experience higher limits, while apps that receive bad ratings will get lower limits. As the Facebook Platform team writes,

Notifications now have more buckets for greater granularity and a broader distribution of thresholds, so applications in higher buckets should receive larger allocations that before and lower buckets should receive smaller allocations. Requests still has the same number of buckets, but the distribution has also been pushed wider, resulting in more requests for some applications and fewer requests for other applications.

Facebook’s continued optimization of its viral channel throttling system is a good thing for the overall health of the Platform – as long as it still allows new applications the chance to bubble up.