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Why has Mark Zuckerberg courted disaster by offending the developers who helped make him worth $4 billion on paper? He has no one but himself to blame, says the CEO of a top Facebook widgetmaker. Facebook failed to control application spam last summer, he says, after it launched its platform. And so last night Facebook revised its rules to allow the applications with favorable user-feedback ratings to send more notifications and invitations. Apps with bad reviews will now have tighter restrictions. It's too little, too late, our source tells us.

Users have already learned to ignore app invites and Zuckerberg surely realizes it. That's why Zuckerberg felt comfortable downplaying applications with his original plans for Facebook's upcoming redesign, provoking strong reactions from developers. It's hard to say which side was greedier, and which more richly deserves its comeuppance .