Jesse Farmer is a University of Chicago math grad living in Palo Alto who, among other things, develops applications that other people can use on Facebook. Like the kinds of polls you can use to ask your friends whether they prefer peanut butter and jelly or jelly and peanut butter.

On Saturday, someone used an application he created, called Polls, to create the Facebook poll asking whether President Obama should be killed. On Sunday, before Farmer's own automated systems had alerted him to the poll, a blogger called GottaLaff had noticed the thing and blogged about it, precipitating the subsequent worldwide news coverage and bringing it to the attention of the Secret Service.

Predictably, a lot of hot air is being devoted to the question of whether developers like Farmer need to do more to police the way their apps are being used.

Farmer's response? Go read Eric Eldon's post on InsideFacebook—which describes the monitoring systems Farmer himself has in place on Polls, which has about 3.5 million active users. The system tracks numbers of users and complaints about specific polls, and when they reach a certain threshold, Farmer "receives a special message, investigates, and deletes the offending poll," Eldon says.

"The problem, in this case," Eldon writes, "is that the poll was discovered before it was even popular enough to register."