Facebook Applications: The Times They Are a Changin’
Published by Rodney Rumford August 28th, 2007 in Facebook, Facebook Applications, Facebook News.
The only constant in life on Facebook is change. This is a good thing. This is how platforms and ecosystems evolve and find the best possible balance of usefulness, visibility, engagement, awareness and non spammy behavior.
Dave Morin at Facebook recently announced that there are more changes coming in how applications can behave as well as how Facebook will provide more meaningful metrics into applications.
“This week you’ll see us shift our application directory metrics to a focus on user engagement. This will help inform users as they make decisions on which applications to add as well as shift developer focus to engagement rather than total users.”
I love this change and was actually discussing this very issue with Dave this weekend. I never felt raw numbers of application installs was a meaningful way to gauge an applications success. Better success metrics are actual canvas page views, return visits and use of a specific application. This is more meaningful data. You will notice that we typically focus on more useful application reviews on this blog.
Engagement: Learn it. Live it. Love it. It is how more meaningful applications evolve. Many applications were installed and that was about it… destined to the clutter of users profile pages; never to be used again.
“With the upcoming changes, we hope to shift the balance more in favor of good apps, which we think in the long term is good for everyone. Users will get better applications, and users will be able to put more trust into applications, thus spurring further adoption.” This is great news for apps that are useful yet not highly viral by nature. Look for an upcoming post on what makes a “Good” application.
The second wave of applications for facebook is coming; and these changes will appeal to the older demographic that is rapidly joining facebook. These more sophisticated apps will have the opportunity spread virally and have an opportunity to rise above some of the noise with the changes outlined.
“Deceptive and misleading notifications will continue to be a focus for us, and we will continue to block applications which behave badly and we will continue to iterate on our automated spam detection tools. You will also see us working on ways to automatically block deceptive notifications.”
Facebook cares and it shows. It cares about developers, it cares about users, it cares about behavior and it cares about it’s ecosystem. All these things combined; and the changes outlined are good for the social graph and the future of facebook.
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Wow, this is great news. I think it’s a great idea to standardize the invitation process - there’s no need for everyone to build the same funcitonality over and over and let people who want to be spammier have an edge. It’ll also be nice to stop stressing overall user counts as much!
Justin
“Eating” app
It is great that they are addressing theses issues. These are some fairly dramatic changes, especially deprecating notification.sendRequest which until now has been the only way to invite your friends to an app. I will be hanging on the edge of my seat to see what they come up with.