My post last week about the growing Facebook fatigue -- largely driven by useless pesty spammy apps -- struck a chord with social|median readers, driving the most uniform agreement of emails I have ever received from a post.

This week, while MySpace was rolling out its own developer platform, Facebook started to fight back and try to reduce the noise.

We'll go in skeptical and see if it works.

Mashable has the story:

Starting next week, Facebook apps that get good user responses from Newsfeed messages (clickthroughs, app installs) will be allowed to send more notifications and apps that get fewer user responses to their notices will have the number of notices they can send cut down. Metered messaging based on user engagement could save the Facebook Platform from a growing sense of app fatigue.

ﾠNewsfeed notices are the Holy Grail for Facebook Apps, but the limits placed on the numbers allowed have always been a bit arbitrary. Allow too many notifications to be sent and users feel spammed by their friends' stupid zombie tossing, allow too few and application growth (and FB pageviews) are stunted.
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This new policy is reminiscent of the Facebook app metric displayed to users concerning the percentage of users who have installed an app who use it daily. That's supposed to be helpful in determining how good an app is before you install it, but all the numbers are so low that it only helps so much. The fact that MySpace will allow apps to appear on users' home admin pages is going to lead to much higher user engagement there and may lead to Facebook emulation of that policy on its Platform.ﾠ

This Facebook strategy of metering message quantity based on user feedback is a smarter way to leverage those types of numbers behind the scenes and should make a bigger difference in the user experience than the daily use numbers have. Note that this is only concerning newsfeed notifications, if you're plagued with unwanted app invites still - make sure to check out IgnoreAll.com.
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The Race to Be Less Annoying

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In an interview I did with MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb about the MySpace Platform this week, it was clear that MySpace has no policy worked out yet for this sort of thing. Whitcomb said they would figure things out once apps are live and do their best to prevent apps from being spammy. They are likely to follow Facebook's approach as reflected in this announcement.
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Innovation in Platform specifics is likely to get hot as Facebook is no longer the only game in town. MySpace's Platform is based on the Google-lead Open Social system, meaning that apps built there should be able to live on a wide variety of other social networks as well. Bebo has seen big growth since releasing a Platform that's compatible with Facebook apps.

From ProgrammableWeb
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Look for more interesting new developments like the rumored Facebook friend recommendations feature. Social networking sites are valuable software, opening up to third party developers is a whole new world, open standards will let a million flowers bloom and this kind of increasingly intelligent administration of those platforms just goes to show that we are in the very early days of a whole new paradigm.

Chis:

• 3M bands on MySpace vs. only a few thousand on major labels.  Artists are now getting discovered by labels from myspace.
• Partnership with MTV for presidential elections is creating fantastic dialogue and engaged young people in elections like never before.  Younger people are reading newspapers less and less and are hardly engaged in politics, except on myspace where they can now get engaged on a different level.
  
• Myspace was "open platform" from the beginning.  That's how the whole widget economy started.  YouTube, Slide, Photobucket.  What that did was create a tremendous amount of traffic while creating a much better user experience on myspace as there was always something new to do when you came back to myspace.
• On MySpace v Facebook.  The widget economy started on myspace.  We allowed widget makes to take traffic off myspace while Facebook created the environment for it to all happen on facebook.  Facebook allowed a little deeper integration on their site with their "closed" platform environment.  Created tighter links into Facebook user experience.
• On OpenSocial.  Creates new defacto standard for application providers to not only have deep integration into myspace but also into dozens of other networks.
• We could have done our own platform but that stifles innovation.  Instead of engineers having to spend time building for multiple platforms, we decided to partner with google to form a defacto open platform. 
  
• Wants Zucks to be part of opensocial.
• Thinks at sometime facebook will have to consider it.
  
• As more and more users are coming online, they are demanding more openness. 
  
• If i'm a web developer, I'm going to choose opensocial.
• myspace open platform specs are out there now.  Developers can develop to the platform immediately.
• of course [facebook and myspace] can both survive.
• 5 years out we will have more traffic and more revenue at myspace from outside the u.s.
• Mobile is increasingly important.  30-40% of access to myspace japan comes from mobile.
• On advertising:  myspace is becoming one of those must buys for media buyers. 
  
• myspace is 12% of all internet minutes, #1 site in the U.S.  advertisers can't ignore that.
• myspace hypertargeting now enables us to drill down into thousands of categories -- e.g. not just movie enthusiasts, but more-so horror movie enthusiasts.
• Initial tests of hypertargeting on myspace are producing 50% greater click thrus vs. standard demo targeting, and up to 300% in some cases.
• Self service platform will enable anyone to setup their own hyper targeted campaign.  can do testing with $50 spend for instance.
   

I just shared a van ride from Nice airport to our hotel for the MMF event in Monaco with Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, who also just happens to be on the panel I'm hosting tomorrow on social media. 

KickApps's white label solution enables website publishers to add social media elements to their sites under their own brands.  Think adding user profiles, UGC, friend of friend contacts, blogging, groups, etc.

Their play is somewhat competitive to Ning, except that Ning is going after the long long tail by enabling individuals/groups to host their own niche social networks while KickApps sells into enterprises.  Also, Ning seems to be much more about building the Ning brand, whereas KickApps is comfortable being an arms provider of their technology to established brands.  Examples of sites using KickApps today include:

• ABC Family
• CBS Affiliate 19 Action News
  
• CWTV's Gossip Girl VIP Lounge
  
• DIY Network
  

• How do you FILA?

• MyRide.com

• Phoenix Suns' Planet Orange

• VIBE Verses 3, Presented by MySpace.

If they execute well, I think these guys have a shot at building an interesting business.  It's basically tools to help web 1.0 sites get web 2.0.  Makes total sense.  Over time though the question is how much of this becomes open source and brought in house.

This is starting to be a competitive market.  See here for a techcrunch review of several of the competing players in the social media apps on demand space.


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(Also joining us for the van ride was Travis Katz, who now runs International for MySpace.  Travis reports that the MySpace team has 100+ developers working on its targeted advertising platform and that they will be rolling out a self-service ad targeting tool for advertisers in the next couple of months which will enable anyone to target brand ads to MySpace user clusters based on a myriad of criteria)

Techcrunch has the story.

Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle. MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google's OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Valley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We've confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining.

Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining. Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace and Six Apart join Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners. No word on whether MySpace will continue with efforts to complete its own recently announced platform, but the answer is probably yes. They are likely to simply do both (Update: see below).

Suddenly, within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game.

Update (12:30 PST): On a press call with Google now. This was embargoed for 5:30 pm PST but they've moved the time up to 12:30 PST (now). Press release will go out later this evening. My notes: On the call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said "we've been working with MySpace for more than a year in secret on this" (likely corresponding to their advertising deal announced a year ago). MySpace says they are abandoning their efforts to create their own markup language (which is what Facebook has done) and direct APIs will go exclusively with OpenSocial. So, MySpace Platform is being terminated before it even launches. The press release names Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING as current OpenSocial partners.

We're seeing a Flixster application on MySpace now through the OpenSocial APIs. Flixster says it took them less than a day to create this. I'll add screen shots below.

Here's the big question - Will Facebook now be forced to join OpenSocial? Google says they are talking to "everyone." This is a major strategic decision for Facebook, and they may have little choice but to join this coalition. Bebo has also joined OpenSocial.