Facebook continues to tighten up some of the rules that govern how applications on the social network’s platform operate, giving users more control over what they allow and when, and making it easier for them to block “bad” applications and prevent the social-networking spam that has been piling up on Facebook over the past six months or so. Like Dare Obasanjo, I’m wondering why it took so long.

The worst thing about all the Zombie requests and movie quiz invites and all of that spam is that it comes from your friends. Occasionally I even find myself swearing under my breath at them (no, not you, Aunt Mabel) because they are so persistent — and then I realize that it’s not really their fault, and that the way many applications are set up, you are all but forced to invite people.

This is some of what Facebook is changing. Apps can’t force you to invite people before you get access to the results of your quiz or whatever the game is; it’s easier to block applications from sending any more invites; you can opt out of any emails sent by applications you’ve already added — and most important, the way an app behaves is based in part on your feedback. If you block or delete notifications from an app, it will find its ability to send those alerts curtailed.

This is something that had to happen — even if, as Allen Stern notes in a comment on TechCrunch, it means that the earliest apps such as SuperPoke and FunWall got a giant leg up over subsequent applications. There’s no question that people have been crying out for these kinds of changes: one group called “Pointless Applications Are Ruining Facebook” has close to half a million members.

Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has the 411 on a new feature on Facebook — everyone’s social-networking walled garden of choice, it seems. The site now allows you to create (gasp) lists of friends, and then easily send messages to one list or another (don’t worry, no one will see whether you’ve put your boss or your high-school pal on the “Mostly Ignore” list). This comes along just as Mark Cuban is wrestling with how to rank his 5,000 friends — so now he can create three lists: people more important than me (a small list, I’m sure); people as important as me (also small, I would imagine); and everyone else. Josh Catone at Read/Write Web is right though — the new feature needs privacy settings built in.