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[Editor's note: This article was co-authored by Eric Eldon.]

When Facebook began enforcing new policy changes in mid December, it was called a “philosophical approach to platform governance.” As we covered on Inside Facebook, “instead of trying to spell out all the rules in detail, it is laying out more general principles and reserving the right to make policy enforcements when its policy team deems doing so to be necessary.”

Looking at what has and hasn’t been enforced since the changes were implemented helps provide some insight into the policy team’s thinking thus far.

When is Gifting Okay?

The policy: “You must not prompt users to send invitations, requests, generate notifications, or use other Facebook communication channels immediately after a user allows access or returns to your application.”

Just about every game launched prior to the changes in December had gifts — where users send gifts to friends, in most cases to users not already playing the game — first and foremost in their viral marketing strategy. This is still still evident by the number of games where the first menu tab is “Free Gifts” or “Send Gifts.” In reviewing 98 game applications with over 100,000 daily active users (DAU), only about 20% of them did NOT have a gifts component at the start of the game (the largest was Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz with 2.8 million DAU).

We’ve been tracking this story over the past week. When we first looked, only four games with more than 100,000 DAU four appeared to be directing users to gift prior to playing the game: Happy Farm (940,000 DAU), Farkle, (840,000 DAU), Garden World (260,000 DAU) and Las Vegas Slots (210,000 DAU).

Facebook tells us that the policy “is not at all meant to stop gifting or virality — it’s meant to prevent users from being prompted to use Facebook communication channels before engaging with the application.” The company wants “users to initiate communications and not be asked to send them right after authorization or every time the user returns to the application.”

“Our expectation is that developers are required to comply with our Principles and Policies,” it says, “and if we come across violations, developers are going to be held accountable.” As many developers have been discovering lately, Facebook won’t punish apps by blocking them completely but rather shutting down some communication channels into fixes are implemented.

Out of the four games mentioned above, three have updated their interfaces to not require gifting, and are in compliance. Garden World still directs users to gift first, but we’re not sure for how long.

Let’s look at some more examples. Titles from Playdom, like Sorority Life and Mobsters 2, are taking users to a gifts screen when you click the Jobs and Missions tabs respectively. So while not the first thing users see when they come to the application, users still must skip the gifts screen (or send items to their friends) before they can actually engage in the game. This interface is okay, Facebook says, because the gift page isn’t what users see first when they add or return to the apps.

While gifts have often been considered social spam (with some developers specifically not including gifts because they feel they are too spammy), the feature has become a very powerful way to get users to interact around a game. Still, one can imagine a gifting mechanism that is a more natural extension of the game’s social aspects.

Café World by Zynga has a Free Gifts tab positioned first among menu items and was one of the first to add a “present” icon as an overlay to the playing screen; the app recently added a “Gift of the Day” section to your friends leaderboard across the bottom — you can send gifts to earn points. This interface is not just okay but a best practice, Facebook says.

It still by default prompts you to send this gift to all of your friends (versus just your Café World friends), but by positioning your promo near the friends leader board, it underscores the behavior that users are more likely to send gifts to their friends actually playing the game.

Pet Society by Playfish has taken the other extreme, only providing gifting of items from a user’s inventory to one of their friends actually playing the game. While this most accurately reflects the typical user’s desire to send something to a friend, it wouldn’t appear to be a top-of-mind functionality that would drive retention or viral growth as it is buried within the inventory “Chest” section of the game.

Eventually, we think most developers will create a gifts functionality that lies somewhere in between the “spam everybody” and “gift to a single friend” philosophies. One way for games like Café World to begin this transition would to change the default from sending to all your friends to just the users playing the game. Then take it one step further, allowing users to filter it to go to only their “active” Café World friends (say those that have played in the last week and thus are more likely to find value in the gift messaging).

Ideally, gifting can be a jumping point for users to have more conversations in and around the game, moving it from a viral marketing tactic to a game experience enhancing transaction that boosts customer retention.

Applications Continue to Gate Content Based on Number of Users

While gifting spam has been reined in a bit thanks to policy changes implemented by Facebook back in December, the company does not yet appear to be enforcing one of the other recent policy changes.

The policy: “You must not provide users with rewards or gate content from users based on their number of friends who use your application.”

Two of the biggest games on Facebooks, Zynga’s FarmVille and Café World, continue to use the practice, leaving developers trying to figure out how to interpret this specific policy. Below, you can see the Café World restaurant expansion requires 12 neighbors and just under 1 million coins (or a user can spend 35 Café World cash – the equivalent of $7 – to unlock the feature).

FarmVille recently introduced its long-awaited 24×24 expansion, and it requires a hefty 30 neighbors (or 60 FarmVille cash – about $12) to unlock. The desirability for this expansion by some players has resulted in long pleas to friends or strangers to “add them” so they can unlock it:

Besides the written responses, we’ve anecdotally heard of friends who have had long-ago forgotten colleagues contact them by phone to request them to friend them on a game to unlock something. That’s powerful stuff.

There is a long history of game design where users can either grind through to earn rewards or pay cash to unlock the items faster – a classic tradeoff between time and money that has helped fund a great number of games.

With Facebook, the ability to virally spread is equally valuable, as a portion of new users will end up spending real cash or bringing in other users. Thus developers like Zynga prize a user who can bring 30 friends to the game initially, then continue to influence (and retain) them through posts about the game. If, as a developer, you can’t remind users with notifications – those are being phased out in a month, you might want an army of users who will post on their walls handle viral communication for you.

While there is definite economic value being exchanged here by both to a developer and the user, it creates some presumably unwanted behaviors:

It induces users to go beyond their social graph of “known” friends. If a user “adds” a stranger, it potentially exposes more personal information than a user realizes they are sharing – basically, their whole profile unless the user actively goes through multiple steps to limit access.

Users are also creating secondary accounts just to play games, distorting DAU and MAU data as well as creating potential cheating issues. Comments on developer fan page posts end up being a litany of “add me” notes, drowning out any true conversation around the content being posted

While the Facebook policy as stated would appear to be squarely focused at eliminating these undesirable behaviors, the lack of enforcement begins to make one wonder if this is as important an issue to Facebook policy team now compared to when the roadmap of changes were initially announced. Clearly some of the latest changes to user information sharing – like privacy settings — were designed to get users to open up more and expand beyond the “known” friends to “Everyone”, so maybe Facebook’s platform team is less worried about users inviting people they don’t know into their personal network.

While the gifting policy has largely been enforced, Facebook says to expect more news on gating:”Our intent is to protect the integrity of the social graph and the authenticity of relationships on the site,” the company tells us, “but we recognize that this is a complex and important topic. We plan to provide more context on this policy soon.”

In the meantime, check out Facebook’s platform policy examples and explanations page for more detail.

This is a repost of an article that originally appeared at Inside Social Games

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