Following its meeting with developers yesterday, Facebook announced some changes it will be making to its homepage. As expected, one of the biggest changes is an attempt to fight application spam.
Notifications from apps that you sign up for are being curtailed so that you can opt to only see those notifications that your friends explicitly send to you. That should get rid of all those random updates about Joey sending some virtual bananas as a gift to someone else you don’t care about. Facebook will also allow users to specify which applications may contact them via email and for what purposes, much like when you register for any Website and they ask you if they can send you marketing newsletters.
Applications, however, will be easier to access. An “Applications” link will appear in the left-hand navigation column. Clicking on that will show you all of your Facebook apps. And in a sign that shows the growing importance of social games in Facebook, “Games” will get their own link in the left-hand dashboard, even though they are a kind of app. Games are special that way.
