Adventures in Mobile Marketing

Nice to see Facebook get down and dirty on controlling the wild spam that goes on with their third party (and yes sometimes core) applications. Check out the FaceBook blog for the actions they’re taking, namely:

Applications must now give you advanced warning if you’ll need to invite friends to get information or access content. So you should always know ahead of time if that quiz you’re taking will require you to invite friends to see your results. If you see applications withholding content without warning, go to that application’s About page to report it.

I think the key challenge these highly communicative, transactional systems have, is how to leverage the interconnectedness without exhausting their base. Opening up the community to third party applications, free to develop and install, is great! But with little control to protect the consumer’s right of contact, a free-for-all happens that is just ugly. One of my friends calls Twitter “death by croutons”- and I think that’s the death nell of any Web 2.0 service, meaningless inundation of messages.

First, let the user set their preferences, and like they say on the blog, let the user be warned before diving into an application if it’s going to require sharing.

Is FaceBook changing the definition of spam? I get invited to install this application from a friend, I block it, as I’m tired of getting these, then FaceBook pops up a message: “we will flag this application as spam.” But is an application, by definition, spamming based on another user’s invitation? Just like “forward to a friend,” essentially, which some folks do define as spammy. I was going to write about NetFlix’s application, which has me in a daily reminder spam loop on a quiz I’d created- but they managed to fix it while I was reporting the error.

The solution, to me, is to setup conservative contact preferences and allow the user to expand them if they want. An open “share all” preference should not be the default, or required.