Post-redesign, Facebook’s platform working well for some applications
Whether you love Facebook’s new redesign or hate it, one thing is clear: The changes have not killed the developer platform, contrary to some reports. It is certainly true that some applications have lost substantial traffic, but not nearly all of them.
For example, the SocialCalendar application, which offers features for coordinating your social life with your Facebook friends, has surged from 478,467 monthly active users as of August 10th to 2,178,010 users as of October 10th. This data and more can be found in the slideshow below, recently provided by third-party app analytics company Developer Analytics. While SocialCalendar was clocking a 44 percent growth rate before Facebook rolled out its redesign in September, it grew 218 percent after — the fastest growth rate of any app on the redesign.
Caveat: The picture here isn’t totally clear, as Facebook regularly adjusts other factors in application growth, like the number of invites and notifications a user of an app can send to friends per day. Maybe Facebook upped these limits for SocialCalendar and some of the others?
Of course, as Developer Analytics’ presentation shows, many other apps have been hit hard.
Other third-party data sources have also been showing mixed results from the redesign. See this earlier report by Facebook-focused blog Inside Facebook and another by rival AllFacebook.
To be clear, I mean “mixed results” for the apps themselves, and the users who love them — Facebook itself fully understood the pain the redesign would cause third parties. It consciously made painful-to-app changes, like pushing apps off of user profile pages and onto a sub-tab called “Boxes” that users have had a hard time finding. The changes, it believes, reward the most meaningful apps while punishing the trivial ones.
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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.
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