Here is some breaking News: Facebook Applications Directory and the Application “About” Pages are now search engine visible to Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. This is great news as it raises awareness, discoverability and visibility of the over 6200 facebook applications. Facebook application listings become more transparent with this search engine visibility.

According to Facebook: “In an effort to continue providing new ways to distribute your applications, we’re making the Application Directory and app “about” pages available to people who are not logged in. We are also enabling these pages to be indexed by search engines like Google, Windows Live, Yahoo!, etc., so that everyone can discover your applications, not just current Facebook users.”

They are also making the reviews section of the applications “About” pages indexable as well. “In addition to containing information about your applications, a large part of why app about pages are useful is because of what users have to say about your app.”

The important thing for app owner to take note of here is that the “reviews” area is what i lightly refer to as the “Bitch Area”. People do not give true application reviews here. They typically say things like: “Great app”, “How come you don’t have this feature”, “The app is broken”, etc. This raises the bar for application developers to respond quickly, take corrective action and listen to users feedback. This reviews area is actually the best feedback look for product feddback/development/enhancement that I have seen in years. Now that the search engines can see it; the importance becomes even greater.

Facebook continues to elaborate… “As always, we’ve made sure that this change respects everyone’s privacy settings. This means that: We will show only first names for all users, and a profile picture will be displayed only if the user allows it in their public listing. This includes the developers of the app. Logged out users will only have read access to the content on the about pages.”

“The goal of this change is to increase visibility for your applications, so users can find applications that they love using, and you can have more potential users trying your applications. You should start seeing your application about pages in web search results in a few days.”

Overall I fully applaud this move as it is very smart. It allows more discovery points for facebook applications and will most likely pull in a slew of new users via google, Yahoo and MSN organic search listings. Cool!

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