So the bubble has finally burst with Facebook application development. It may not be an obvious crash that an average Facebook user would notice, but it surely does send a (positive) bang for the Facebook development community.

Last week, Facebook implemented an “ignore all” feature to application invitations. Application invitations were getting out of control! You may remember getting flooded with invitations to iLike, Hot or Not, and dozens of other apps that you have no interest in whatsoever. Now with a simple click of a button, you can clear them all out. This means that apps cannot depend on expanding their reach by taking the easy way and forcing their users to send out invitations to their buddies.

Then, just recently, Facebook announced a limit to the number of notifications that an app can send out. Now the valuable real estate on your Facebook front page won’t be plastered (as much) with irrelevant application updates from your friends.

This notification limit will depend on a variety of factors, but the point is that it will encourage developers to improve the quality of their applications. More relevant information and less spam! This also fattens up the barrier to entry for emerging apps because free, easy exposure on Facebook is harder to come by.

As you can see, this is a turning point. Making a Facebook application “go viral” will now take a lot more skill and planning than before.

We all had a blast with Facebook Applications 1.0. Shitty applications could go viral overnight while banner ads started being slapped on the headers and footers of every application.

The playing field has now changed for the better, and you can expect to see more complex apps that are not as easily cloneable and provide a better user experience. And more importantly, apps that truly take advantage of all the valuable personal data floating around on social networks to create rich, useful information for the user.