Inside Facebook

When every social platform launches, developers find ways to cut corners and spam the system. After a while, the social network gets wind of user complaints, and makes changes to the platform accordingly.

While MySpace has been comparatively very cautious in its platform roll-out so far (which is still only semi-complete), it is tweaking the communication channels that have already launched. MySpace recently limited the “postTo” extension to only allow users to send messages to friends. MySpace’s Chris Cole writes,

We have added a new privacy communication setting to users’ profiles and slightly restricted how apps may send messages and comments. As originally deployed, an application could use the MySpace postTo extension to send messages to any user in the MySpace system, subject to that user’s spam and privacy settings.  To curtail abuse (occassionally a spammy app makes it thru the review gauntlet) we have tightened this up so that apps may only send messages to a viewer’s friends.

In addition, MySpace added a new setting to allow users to disable communications from all apps. Developers will see a “Undeliverable Message or Comment” error message when attempting to message users for whom this is the case.