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Facebook Continues to Make Big Changes

Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 14th, 2008 9:41 AM

Following yesterday’s announcement that Facebook will be ending forced invites, Tom Whitnah has announced yet another significant change to the Facebook invites system. The new system “will be based on the rate that users accept and ignore requests, whether an application ignores user requests to skip inviting friends, as well as other metrics that reflect the affinity users show for the application as a whole.”

My guess is that the affinity metric will be related to the overall rating that users provide for any given application. This new system shows that Facebook is taking their invite system seriously and as such we will see a significant reduction in spam. We also will see a number of larger applications get hit significantly. Previously applications were limited to sending out 40 notifications per day per user and by the end of the week the average number of notifications will be limited to 10 per application.

I’ve had developers who’s livelihood rely on the success of their application contacting me to express how these new changes will negatively impact their application. I’m sure there are others that will be positively impacted but I haven’t heard from those individuals so far. I would expect a number of applications to rapidly die off as a result of these changes, especially those that have been using notifications as spam. Do you think these changes are good?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 4 Comments

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    > I’ve had developers who’s livelihood rely on the success of
    > their application contacting me to express how these new
    > changes will negatively impact their application.

    Serves them right for spamming the rest of us and (probably) ruining lots of opportunities for others. If their applications were good to begin with, they shouldn't have any trouble.
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    • v
    For about the last month, I haven't even been looking at the Application invites I've gotten. I've probably missed out on some good ones, but when you get 20 invites a day, you just don't have time. If invites go down, I'll probably install more apps.
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    Nick-

    These changes are great for apps that facillitate messaging and communication between facebook users, groups and events like our CircleUp app does at facebook. We've had to scramble like crazy to facillitate basic things like getting a tshirt order together for 60 people attending an event or matching up riders and drives for a group going on a snowboard trip.

    When group admins send out a circleup via a group message, everything is great, but if they are not an admin and have to use notifications, response rates are insanely low.

    So anything Facebook does to clean up the landscape will make it possible for truly useful apps to emerge. When we look at the clicks, it seems most people are ignoring notifications entirely.

    -john
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    As someone who is, at the moment, in a dead-on Rawlsian "Veil of Ignorance" situation—my app, which I personally think is nifty but who knows, was just added to the Directory—the recent changes fill me with unmitigated delight. Users are the point of Facebook, not Developers, and anything that helps users distinguish between apps that are useful to them and useless to them is a good thing. If my app had failed to attract a satisfying user base under the old system, I would have just shrugged and assumed that my app was indeed lost in the Library of Babel. Now, I will have to take it as a meaningful metric and hence a form of constructive criticism. Anyone who isn't looking for constructive criticism shouldn't be designing apps.

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