Your points are not bad, just short-sighted. Specifically, if you track the development of the social web you will find loads of instances in which security breaches, spam or worms develop when critical mass reaches an audience and dilutes the user pool which was previously made up of early adopters. This is obviously due to the fact that these practices are financially beneficial once a certain user threshold number is met.

The good news is that, just as “spammy” technology develops, so does technology that deals with this technology. Interestingly enough this development also hinges upon an early adopter group, in this case early spamming/worming groups.

Point being, instead of Facebook controlling apps and altering the landscape for success, they should allow their developers in the marketplace to deal with this issue — and reap the profits of this development.

That's just how the market works.

|digitalzaar|

now, in order to compensate these well-behaving apps for the loss of virality that they have to endure to pass the criteria of the verification program, facebook gives them prominent placement in the directory. I think it is a good move and i can only hope it does well

I just can't help but feel like allowing Facebook to determine which apps are verified is a very slippery slope. I have friends who work at and have worked at Facebook — what if they decide to pick a market that is saturated (say SMS messaging), develop a similar technology and then miraculously their app is verified. I know this sounds very “but there really are UFOs!!” but lets not be naive.

Why not just filter apps by amount of users and let the cream rise?