Policy Update: All Feed Story Calls to Action Must Now be Action Links
Facebook announced new policies on Friday that affect the way application developers can design feed stories.
Of the changes announced, the one that should have the most immediate impact on developers is the new requirement that all calls to action in feed stories must now be formatted into Action Links. This means that developers who had put calls to action in the images or body of the feed stories need to update their design.
The idea behind the new policy is Facebook’s motivation to protect the integrity of the feed by preventing aggressive application developers from putting “too spammy” content in their feed stories. Action links (which appear next to Facebook’s default action links, “Comment” and “Like”) are more structured than the body of feed stories.
In addition, Facebook says that, “Applications cannot include a call to action in a Feed story unless the call to action directly pertains to acting on or viewing content described in the story, or offers the opportunity to perform the same action described in the story.”
The new policies go into effect Monday, April 20.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
So all those “pick 5″ quizzes can no longer have a 6th image that says “pick your 5″?
Why is Facebook determined to shut down everything that works for apps?
April 5th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
It is about facebook discipline, what i call “text discipline”. Text is less intruding over images, unless you read they dont shout aloud. Hope fb gives enough time window for developers to comply.