2 Ways Facebook and hi5 Could Improve User-Feedback Driven Viral Channel Limits
While I think a user-feedback system that Facebook and now hi5 have implemented is the right type of approach to limit spam (as opposed to a rule-based approach that MySpace has taken), both Facebook and hi5 could improve their quota/allocation system in 2 ways:
- Track spamminess on a user level, not just on an app level. A few users cause a disproportionate amount of spam, and taking their behavior into account when assigning application limits is inefficient. Different users should have different limits based on their reputation.
- Track spamminess on a notification level. A few notifications cause a disproportionate amount of spam, but few developers have built metrics systems to know which ones are great/suck. Facebook and hi5 should require developers to register templates for all requests and notifications, and track performance on a template level, telling developers which specific templates (flows) need to be improved.
These changes would improve the entire ecosystem for the platform, developers, and users.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:08 am
Track spamminess on a user level, not just on an app level
Dear lord, yes. We’re going to be putting notifications into our app soonish, and this is one of the biggest concerns. We’re giving users a good deal of control over the notifications that they send, and it’s a real concern that a few notification hogs might well harm the whole app.
It would make *much* more sense to track spamminess on a finer-grained user/app level, and have the users who cause issues within a particular app get throttled down a bit…
June 19th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Hi Justin,
I really agree with number 2 in particular. Right now it is very difficult to tell which notifications are the ones being marked as spam. Perhaps you can point a link to the bugtracker/developer wiki for this issue so that more developers can echo this sentiment.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Hi, Nisan.
I am the Platform Product Manager for hi5 — if you meant to ask about our developer wiki/bugtracker, you can access it via http://developer.hi5.com. You can login via OpenID (I use my Yahoo! account) to edit the wiki/add bugs.
We would love to hear more detailed ideas on what sort of templates we can enable for developers to get more granular notifications.
Sameer.
August 6th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
may i ask where are my profile comments cause comments from last year had came on my profile so i would like to know what happened to my comment that i just got please put them back ok thank you