MySpace gives third party developers anti-abuse guidelines
Third party application developers on MySpace just got more guidance on what will happen if they abuse its users: An escalating series of warnings and punishments, ending in a full ban from the platform.
Clarifying punishment for abuse is a necessary step that a social network — or any company with a platform — must take to guide a platform ecosystem to stability.
News Corp.-owned MySpace launched its platform this spring, and it has been quiet about how it treats applications that do things like spam users with unwanted invites, emails and other annoying practices. Until now, only those developers who actually got punished were told about how punishment worked.
MySpace’s newly-stated policies, from its developer blog:
On first violation:
- In most instances,the application developer will receive a notice giving them 48 hours to fix the issue. If the problem is not fixed within that period of time, the application will be muted (muted applications may not send communication) for 48 hrs. If the application is still not fixed after 48 hours, it will be suspended.
- Should one company have an application in violation of policy once, and then do something with another application, that will be considered a second violation.
On second violation:
- The application will be muted immediately, then suspended after 48 hours.
On third violation:
- The application will be suspended immediately.
Facebook, which last year became the first large social network to launch a developer platform, has been continually updating what developers can and can’t do on it. Its rule changes culminated in a new set of guidelines announced last month, that try to incentivize constructive app behavior.
But Facebook’s platform is still much larger than MySpace’s. So these newly-announced MySpace developer guidelines will, the company no doubt hopes, help more developers understand how they can legitimately succeed on its platform — and in doing so give it some more market share.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.