Facebook Statistics for Applications
Published by Rodney Rumford September 26th, 2007 in Facebook, Facebook Applications.
Facebook just went live with statistics for applications in the last 2 hours. Having applications performance stats is critical for application owners. This is a great tool for application owners to gain more insights into their application performance on a few levels.
The initial facebook statistics offering is somewhat limited, but it beats the heck out of no stats and driving blind. This statistical data is only available to application owners. This is their first pass at providing these sorts of insights and I am confident it will get better in the future. But I am thrilled to just have these stats quite candidly. 
Currently the application statistics page displays some basic information about the number of adds, removes, blocks, and total users, as well as a summary of sampled HTTP requests for the facebook application. The stats are performing in real time as far as we can tell. Right now the stats can be sorted by date ranges, this is nice. This is really good news and I commend the Facebook team for making these available.
Having detailed metrics and statistics are crucial to running any business. Having insights into performance will ultimately help applications become more sophisticated and allow some insights to performance. I will talk about the importance of metrics for facebook in future blog posts.
Here is an application statistics screen shot for a cool greeting cards application that we are developing and testing tonight in QA.
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I think this was a logical next step — Facebook has the data — now, it’s sharing it with the app owners.
As a next step, I would expect to see transactional metrics. E.g. if a service is accepting revenue, directly or indirectly (e.g. PayPal), I think that will be reported next.
Then, in a year or so from now, Facebook will take its commission on all revenue-generating applications. I’d look to Amazon Marketplace as a logical next approach.
Will be very interesting to watch, for sure!