Six Degrees: come in, your time is up

From Facebook today:

We’re writing to inform you of a Facebook Platform policy violation within your application, Six Degrees.

Our terms and policies are in place to ensure that Facebook Platform serves users well, allows applications to thrive, and provides a great experience for all involved. Unfortunately, we have determined that your application does not meet our terms and policies.

Specifically, your application contains “Store my friend list” and “Keep up-to-date” functionalities that imply storing data in violation of our policies on this behavior. Whether you obtain user permission or not, applications may not store data obtained from Facebook for longer than 24 hours per section I.6.1 of our Platform Guidelines (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Platform_Guidelines). This includes friend connections between two users, as mentioned on http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Storable_Data .

We request that you stop storing this data. As friend connections are crucial to your application’s functionality, we recommend that you prompt users to grant the offline_access permission and then query their friend list dynamically as required. For more information, please see http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Extended_permission .

Additionally, it appears that your application pre-fills text fields in the Settings section with user data, including but not limited to first name, last name, and gender. Data obtained and stored through these means of pre-filling is still in violation of our data policies, as explained in section I.14.2 of our Platform Guidelines. We request that you stop pre-filling these fields with user data.

Finally, your application publishes a one-line Feed story when users authorize it. These stories read ” has logged into the Six Degrees application” and are in violation of section II.5.1 of our Platform Guidelines. We request that you remove them from your application.

We trust and expect that all applications managed by you and your team meet our terms and policies, so we appreciate in advance that you proactively ensure that this is the case in the future.

Please make these requested changes by 1:00pm Pacific Time Thursday, 25 June 2009. When you have done so, please let us know by replying to this email.

We realize that this is a short timeframe, but it is important for the sake of our users and other developers that this issue is resolved quickly. If you cannot resolve this by the above deadline, your application may be subject to additional enforcement actions, including but not limited to being disabled.

10 thoughts on “Six Degrees: come in, your time is up”

  1. Ah – I went looking for Six Degrees on Facebook today and didn't find it. Now I know why!Have you retired it? Do you expect it to be less accurate if you make the changes they suggest?

  2. Houston, we have a problem…Found the reference in Wikipedia to your application, but after being unable to locate it there found your blog entry above. Absolutely can't imagine what the implications are for the application's future, but hope they're more hopeful than I am!

  3. What a pity. 6 degrees is (was) the best app on facebook. Not too hard given the incredible banality of most apps, but genuinely useful and interesting.Figure that deleting and re-querying every 24 hours would be impractical so app is dead. True?Anyway, facebook will get theirs in time. The platform is gen X-Y. Gen zero will surely choose their own, and we can tag along.So long, and thanks for all the fish.

  4. So what's the story – is the app really dead? It was the best app on Facebook!Need any help getting it available again?

  5. Such a shame that you've been forced out by Facebook. I was really looking forward to searching for links once more people had signed up.Good luck with the re-write… if you intend to do so.

  6. That's very sad. This was my favourite application on Facebook, in fact the only one that did anything particularly clever. I wondered why it disappeared so suddenly!Darren

  7. Why don't you obtain the offline_access permission from the user. Then you can set a last_updated flag against each user and refresh his data every 23 hrs or so :)So, FB can't say you stored data for more than 24 hrs since you got it.

  8. Can you not put it back up with the recommended changes?I'd really like to see this app back on Facebook… Good luck with everything!

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