Sunday, 27 January 2013
Facebook clarifies app-blocking policies
Posted on 06:05 by Maria Scott
In the wake of apps like Vine and
Wonder having their access to the social network revoked, Facebook
today clarified how its platform policies work.
Without specifically addressing Vine or Wonder, Facebook's Justin Osofsky wrote in a blog post
that the "vast majority" of Facebook app developers are not in
violation of Facebook's policies. "Keep doing what you're doing," he
said.
A "much smaller number of apps,"
however, are just using Facebook to "either replicate our functionality
or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for
people on Facebook."
As a result, Facebook has updated one section of its platform policies
to specify that apps connecting to Facebook must let users "easily
share their experiences back with people on Facebook." The app also
cannot mimic Facebook or use its data without permission.
Old wording:
Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to
export user data into a competing social network without our permission.
New wording:
Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity:
Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social
experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. If you use any Facebook
APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable
people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook.
(b) Replicating core functionality: You may not use Facebook Platform
to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that
replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.
"We are committed to helping you build
great apps with Facebook, and will continue to invest in products that
help you succeed while creating a healthy ecosystem," Osofsky
concluded.
The move is the latest in the battle of Facebook vs. Twitter. Of the recently blocked apps - which also includes push-to-talk app Voxer - Vine is owned by Twitter, while Twitter and Wonder creator Yandex signed a deal last year that let Yandex display public tweets in its search results.
The Vine app, which lets users create
GIF-like, six-second videos, allows users (in theory) to tap into
Facebook to find friends and share their Vines. Facebook blocked access
to Vine shortly after its Thursday debut;
Twitter access also went down temporarily, too. By day's end, Vine
tweeted that it had "restored sharing to Twitter and Facebook," but this
afternoon, any attemps to link to Facebook were throwing up errors on
the app.
Prior to the block, Vine allowed users
to share their videos to Facebook, but Facebook users couldn't watch
Vine videos on Facebook.com. Sharing to Facebook produced a preview of
the Vine on the user's profile; clicking it brought people to Vine's
website. Ultimately, Facebook doesn't really want its users leaving the
confines of its social network, so this likely didn't sit well. If
people were able to watch Vines directly from the news feed or
someone's profile, that would likely fix the problem.
The same thing, meanwhile, happened to Yandex's Wonder app.
As of now, any new users trying to sign up to Wonder via Facebook
receive an error message. "We are in touch with Facebook to enquire
about the reasons for this and what can be done to solve this problem," a
Yandex spokesman said today.
Wonder is essentially a search engine
with a focus on places, music, and news, tapping into Facebook for some
of its results. Given that Facebook just launched its own search
product - Graph Search - it's likely not too eager to hand its data over to a rival app that doesn't provide much in return.
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