Facebook users can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. Effective March 1st, 2010, Facebook has terminated notifications sent by applications, providing your notifications feed with some much-needed relief from serial spammers. But is disabling Application Notifications really enough to quell the growing concerns of Facebook users that Facebook cares more about applications than users?

Facebook users have long complained that a small minority of users are ruining Facebook for the majority of people by allowing their applications (most notably their games) to send spammy out spammy notifications and updates to their News Feed, which then appear on other people’s homepages and generally disrupt their browsing experience.

Although the News Feed spam is going to continue for now, at least the notifications application spam is over. Remember, “notifications” are those updates (the ones that used to be on the bottom-right) that were supposed to alert you to important and relevant actions from your friends. The problem, of course, is that any applications your friends use were authorized to send whatever notifications they wanted to your notifications feed, which very quickly ruined the idea of “important” and “relevant” notifications.

Facebook has published a how-to guide for spamming users list of best practices for communications channels to help application designers waste more of your time build their userbase and re-engage users. Here’s what they have to say about the now-defunct notifications:

“In place of notifications, you should notify users of actions they should take with Counters, tell them short messages with news in the dashboards, or ask for permission to send users emails. You can also encourage them to share messages with each other through Share.”

So basically, what they’re saying is, instead of spamming people with the notifications system, you should spam them with every other possible communications channel. Great. Thanks, Facebook. You really understand what your users want – to be aggressively spammed by anyone who wants to do so.

In the place of notifications are “counters,” which work similarly to the counters on your notifications or inbox. Each application gets its own counter, and the counter is incremented when there’s a new actionable item that app users should be made aware of.

Overall, the news that Facebook is removing application notifications shouldn’t be mistaken or misunderstood; Facebook is not taking action against spammy applications; they’re simply reorganizing the ways that applications are being spammy. A quick look over the best practices guide reveals that more changes are coming down the line, none of which include removing the ability of applications to piss off and irritate people who don’t use them and have no intention of ever doing so.

No, instead, Facebook puts the burden of stopping spam on friends, not applications. If you don’t want to receive irritating application invitations from your friends, your only choice is to unfriend them or block each application one by one. In the long term, these spammy applications are going to spell the downfall of Facebook…it’s just a matter of when the breaking point comes.