Did Facebook Shut Down Slide’s Top Friends? How Very MySpace Of Them

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 me 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.

So what happened? We won’t know until morning. But this isn’t just a broken application, since the app page is redirecting to Facebook.com.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 5:30 am and is filed under BLOGROLL, CREATIVITY, MEDIA, MOBILE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.