Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Rules! Rules! Rules! — Knowing Facebook's Terms of Service

Understanding Facebook's platform policy can take you a long way in planning your application. Facebook has many rules that you must understand and follow to prevent yourself from getting banned in the future. While legal jargon can appear scary at times, spend some time reading through Facebook Platform's policy and trying to understand it.

The following sections describe some current highlights of Facebook Platform's policy. To read these, go to Facebook's Developer Web site and click Platform Policies.

Understanding Facebook's principles

Facebook lists a few guiding principles by which all developers should abide. These principles center around having a good experience for your users and building trust with them, extending Facebook's core experience into your own. According to Facebook, these principles are as follows:

• “Create a great user experience”: By this, Facebook means that you should build engaging applications that give users a degree of choice and control and that help users share opinions and content.
• “Be trustworthy”: By this, Facebook means that you should respect users' privacy and that you should not spam, mislead, confuse, or surprise users. In other words, you should be respectful and encourage genuine, open communication with users.

I think it's safe to say that if you generally follow these core principles in your Web site or application, you'll be fine. More than anything, treat your users with ...