Bad news for folks who really love to know about every little thing their friends do using a Facebook app: The social network is finally making apps less annoying by preventing them from automatically posting about every single action taken by a user.
Beginning on Wednesday, expect to see a little bit less spam, but still plenty of notes about the stories your friends are reading on some random news site or the songs they're listening to using their favorite music-streaming service.
Facebook casually made the change official with a tiny note on its developers blog on Monday.
The itty-bitty note was first noticed by the eagle-eyed Mike Isaac of All Things D and basically informs us that Facebook's finally cleaning up the News Feed and Ticker, as it promised it would back in October 2012. At that time, engineer Henry Zhang wrote a post on the official Facebook blog, pointing out that "[w]hen apps automatically publish stories on a person?s behalf in a way that is unexpected, such as when they browse an online store, it can surprise and confuse people." After sharing this incredibly shocking insight ? imagine that users might be annoyed by spammy posts ? the social network decided that something needed to give.
After Zhang's blog post, many developers began ceasing to publish the automatic stories and moved on to the "like," "follow," "listen," "read," and "watch" actions preferred by the social network. On Wednesday, that'll be the only way they can continue pestering you. Yes, those posts aren't going anywhere.
Whew! And here you thought you'd have to start actually talking to your friends in order to know what they're doing!
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