Facebook’s platform to reward good, punish bad applications

August 27, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments |
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faceb.png Facebook will introduce significant changes to its developer platform in the coming weeks, according to a post this evening by Facebook’s senior platform manager, Dave Morin.

He says the goal is to build Facebook users’ trust in third party applications on the site, so the best apps win and growth happens naturally, not spammily.

While we’re short on the specifics at this time, here’s what to expect:

News feeds will become a better viral app distributor: Each Facebook user’s homepage features “news feeds” that show you the most interesting actions your friends take on the site — such as posting hot pictures of themselves, or talking trash to each other.

While news feeds already show you when friends add a new application, Facebook will start optimizing news feed algorithms to better highlight popular applications to friends who haven’t already added them.

Even though Morin says news feed changes won’t come right way, we already know that proper tweaking of the news feed algorithms could ensure a perpetual viral channel for the best applications to keep getting exposure.

Bad apps will continue to get busted: Say goodbye to spammy invites to apps, spammy email notifications, and spammy app content on your own profile — hopefully.

Facebook will revamp how users are able to manually invite their friends to install a new application, introducing a variety of options for developers depending on the type of app they build. When Facebook first launched, you could invite as many friends to applications as you wanted. The company quickly limited how many invites you could send per day, per app, because of rampant tricks by some app developers to get people to unintentionally invite friends.

Users will, at least for now, say goodbye completely to annoying email notifications sent from applications; Facebook may re-introduce email notifications, once it figures out how to spare users the spam.

As announced last week, Facebook is also restricting applications from displaying content within your profile page that you haven’t been told about.

Better metrics for app junkies: Users and app developers (and the reporters who cover Facebook) will get a better measure of which apps people care about enough to use on a regular basis, rather than how many total users have each app installed.

This move isn’t surprising, as Facebook itself makes a point of announcing its “active users” — people who logged in within the last month — to highlight how its competitors have trouble keeping their own users’ attention.

This metric should also help fledgeling ad networks on Facebook see which apps get the most recurring eyeballs — and have the potential to bring in the most ad money.

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Photo of Eric Eldon

About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • The top makers of Facebook apps have ALREADY changed their focus to engagement (over simply count); this is in marked contrast to Myspace. See more at http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/facebook-f...
  • good move by Facebook in general on user engagmenet metrics (and kudos to Dave Morin for trying to give a heads-up to the developer community *before* they make the change).

    that said, i know from speaking to several Facebook App developers that aiming for a moving target on invites / notifications / messaging strategy is pretty challenging.

    hopefully there is some "give" for "white hats" as well as some "take away" for "black hats" on the available messaging features.

    still, i like the philosophy overall. given that things are moving so quickly, good to see them adjusting strategy to help benefit the overall community.

    btw, my thoughts on FB user engagement metrics here:
    http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/07/use...
  • I agree with Dave. This is a great move by Facebook and couldn't come at a better time. There is an old saying in business that: "if you can measure it, you can manage it." Up until now, Facebook has only measured (or at least only published) the net number of App Users. This led to many of the app developers focusing solely on this one metric. Even the number of installs vs. uninstalls was hidden, so there was no way for users to see which apps were just churning through users and which had any level of staying power built on repeat engagements.

    Jesse Farmer, CTO of Adonomics.com (an Altura Ventures portfolio), is working right now an an Adonomics API that will allow app developers to begin to track installs and unintstalls. Coming shortly after this will be a whole host of metrics that the Adonomics API will support that will allow the App Developers to truly measure and manage the complete lifecycle of their users. This will include the integration of the new stats that Facebook will be publishing on a daily basis in addition to the time-based graphs that Adonomics (formerly Appaholic) presents to show the history of each Facebook app and which will soon begin to predict future trends.

    As the first Facebook-only VC, Altura Ventures is pleased to see these moves by Facebook for more transparency in the metrics about each app. With this transparency will come trust of the advertisers who want to know that their dollars are being spent wisely. This is yet another sign that Facebook is taking care of their most valuable asset: the attention span of their user base.
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