TECHCRUNCH
MICHAEL ARRINGTON
26 JUNE 08
MySpace used to be notorious for simply banning third party widgets that didn’t play nice (”not playing nice” generally meant any kind of advertisements in the widgets, but it was very arbitrary). Those days are long gone. Maybe now, though, Facebook is having a go at it.
Until now Facebook combated black hat applications by just tightening up the rules to shut down loopholes. The problem with that approach is that it tends to reward bad behavior, since the only downside is that it’ll be stopped at some point and your competitors won’t have the same ability to spam that you did. A race to the bottom ensued. And Slide and RockYou tended to be among the worst offenders.
Tonight though that may have changed. A hugely popular Slide application called Top Friends (review here
) has simply vanished from Facebook’s site. Users who had installed it don’t see it, searches for it in the directory turn up empty, and the URL for the application now redirects to the Facebook home page. It’s like it never existed.