452 days

Rosa Golijan

Facebook bans creepy relationship status tracking app

To the delight of creepy stalkers everywhere, a Facebook app designed to track relationship status changes was released recently.

Unfortunately Facebook was not crazy about this app and decided to ban it.

TechCrunch reports that Breakup Notifier will no longer be sending e-mails to people as soon as their friends change their relationship statuses. The app had more than 3.6 million users.

Apparently Breakup Notifier's creator Dan Loewenherz, realized something was wrong with his app's operation earlier and tried to find an explanation for the troubles. All that he discovered though was a generic breakup email sitting in his inbox early this morning:

To ensure positive user experiences on Platform, we run routine automated screens that take user feedback, machine learning and various algorithms into account and remove spammy applications. For example, if an application is making an inordinate number of stream.publish calls and receiving a large number of user reports, it may be removed by our automated systems to protect the user experience and the Platform ecosystem.

The social network dumped Loewenherz and his app because they were too popular.

We tried to console Loewenherz about the breakup, but when we spoke to him he still seemed distraught over the fact that Facebook hasn't returned a single e-mail or phone call — and it still hasn't unlocked his personal Facebook account either. Ouch.

Related stories:

• Creepy Facebook app automatically tracks breakups
• 1 million Facebook friends buy this woman a jerk
• Facebook relationship status change leads to arrest

Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's pretty obsessed with Twitter, but you can like her on Facebook anyway — just don't stalk her too much, please.