Calling All Bracket Applications

The NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament, also known as March Madness, officially begins next Thursday, March 19. Building a bracket and challenging your friends has long been a special activity for many U.S. users on Facebook - first with an application developed by Facebook, and more recently with applications developed on Facebook Platform. Over 800,000 users are already engaging with related applications on Facebook Platform.

Because there is a short period of time between Selection Sunday (March 15th) and the tournament beginning on the following Thursday, we have seen users have some challenges getting all of their friends and bracket groups set up in time. To try to address that problem, we're allowing for a higher request flow, while we monitor the impact and ensure users have a great experience without seeing a significant increase in spam. We hope to offer similar privileges in the future for other events.

We'd like to welcome any app that is focused on building brackets and challenging friends around the 2009 NCAA Tournament to this test. We identified several 2009 bracket applications via the Application Directory that are live already, and have reached out to those developers. If you are building one and we have missed you, please contact us and include NCAA Bracket in the "Issue Summary" field. We will review your application to ensure that it meets standard Facebook policies and then will add you to the test.

We'd love to hear your feedback on these changes. Please add your comments to our Developer Forum.