Facebook Killed Spam!

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor told Fast Company earlier this week that it's just those kind of messages the company focused on while looking to cut down on spam in the system -- way down.

Mission accomplished. Such spam was down 95% in 2010. That's an impressive achievement. But the backstory to how the company accomplished that feat reveals some of the internal thinking that could be key to Facebook's ability to continue to grow efficiently -- and become an all-around ever-stronger product -- in the years to come.

The spam Facebook was targeting were those annoying messages from the likes of FarmVille or Mafia Wars (about Rich and his corn or whatnot) that used to pollute users' NewsFeeds.
Game companies liked them, because they raised awareness and helped recruit new users. But, said Taylor at the Inside Social Apps conference on Tuesday, the company soon realized that that was just a bad experience for many Facebook citizens.

That was bad for Facebook -- it sucked up employee bandwidth -- and it was bad for developers, who felt like Facebook was micromanaging them. Interestingly, Facebook decided not to go the law and order route. They didn't start writing out long lists of rules about what kinds of messages would be allowed and what kinds wouldn't.
Instead, Taylor told Fast Company in an interview following the talk, they built an automated system that monitored each individual message -- and then took action, again, automated, against the specific messages that seemed to be bothering users.
Specifically, the system tracks whether recipients hide certain messages or mark them as spam, or whether they click "Like" on the message or comment on it, or whether they actually click through to see the application itself. If too many recipients hide a message or mark it as spam, Facebook automatically starts blocking it.

All of which bodes well for Facebook. The better experiences it can create while minimizing the demand on its own resources, the faster it will be able to grow, and the more loyalty it will get from its users and developers.