Will Facebook Redesign End Game Spam?

Every season, Facebook alters its design based on the needs and actions of its millions of users. With social games taking up an ever-growing portion of each user's day to day time with the social network, it might not be a shock to see that the next alteration will deal with the barrage of requests, gifts and updates that users receive by agreeing to become a member of a friend's farm, mob or virtual neighborhood.

While the alterations may not be final, Inside Social Games received pictures that show the direction that Facebook is going, with three new icons that capture Requests, Notifications and Messages. While Notifications currently resides on the bottom right of Facebook, moving it to the top might make it easier to track those updates. As such, moving Requests from the side of the News Feed page to the Facebook bar might make it easier to deal with all those friend inquiries.

Yet Requests have become the new spam as players of any social game try to add more players to their experience in order to gain an edge over other players. The issue has only intensified as more social games have come to the Facebook world and during the last redesign, well known games like Mafia Wars, Café World, Roller Coaster Kingdom and other social apps were given their own request subareas to deal with the deluge of requests.

One suggestion has been to cut down on the Request Spam by moving gift and reward requests into the games themselves since they could receive more requests in-game and avoid the tedious actions where a user has to accept the request in Facebook, then switch to game and then back to Facebook Request to receive more.

So will the request spam end? We're inclined to say no but it's good to see that Facebook may help players deal with those requests in a better way.