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When Facebook launched their platform last year, one of the primary drivers behind many developers decision to launch on the platform was the much prized position of being placed in the news feed. Instantly application stories flooded the news feed becoming one of the primary sources of spam on the website. Since then it appears that Facebook has adjusted the news feed algorithm so that practically no application stories are displayed.
One application developer I spoke with said that they’ve seen one news feed story in the feed in the past 30 days. While the live news feed is flooded with application stories, very few of them seem to be making it to the main feed. If Facebook Connect sites get the same sort of exposure, there will be less incentive for sites to integrated. Granted, Facebook claims that Facebook Connect has increased engagement on developers’ sites but is that enough of an incentive for implementing the service?
So far I’ve had a pretty good experience and have begun to see an increase in engagement but the real purpose for integrating with Facebook Connect is the possibility of expanding my reach. It’s still far too early to give a fair judgement of Facebook Connect (in contrast to the platform which within a day was a huge success) but if application stories are truly being demoted, Facebook will have lost the biggest incentive for developers.
What’s the value of Facebook’s platform versus competing platforms when the viral channels have been eliminated? Ultimately there is still the tight integration and display within the Facebook chrome which reduces the barrier to entry but Facebook Connect already removes the primary barrier to entry on traditional websites: registration forms.
Without the news feed is there really a significant incentive for building within Facebook instead of integrating notifications and invites from your Facebook Connect enabled site?
My biggest bone of contention with Facebook is the lack of a permissions based system that gives more control to the end user as to what gets views where and when. They’ve touched the surface on this but as it is now, even the privacy and application settings are to deep or disorganized for the average user to set things up in a way that they themselves want.
How about what feeds to display by default, or sending an application to a particular feed? This sort of structure will engage the users on a more personal and practical level. Add to that, give the developers an option to ask the users where they want the feed displayed, even in multiple instances, in categories if you will.
This is all just off the top of my head and I’m sure others have more to contribute then myself since I’m not a developer, I’m a user who likes to manipulate what’s in front of me, whether that be on Facebook or in the guts of Wordpress. Give me the options and tools to manage things the way I want and that ideal go for developers as well.
If Facebook is just going to arbitrarily change things without so much as an alternative, then I’d have to agree, the lack of news feed exposure will have an impact on potential developers. The devils advocate in me also see’s this as a way of getting rid of the small time application spam that more often times then not, seems petty, unprofessional and pointless.
Stew
By the way, I just tried the fconnect here on the blog. It logged me in at first and didn’t show my display picture. I was about to start writing my comment and it logged me out. Not sure if it’s me, a setting on my FB, or maybe I’m missing an application on FB to allow it to keep me logged in. Weird…
With the demotion of apps to the Boxes tab, amongst other things, and now this, I see less and less incentive to build on the FB platform. It was always a nightmare to build for to begin with. I really have no incentive to spend any time following it anymore and I find it harder to rationalize to clients that it’s even something they need in their online strategies.
Once everyone really gets hip to things like DataPortability.org, openAuth, openSocial, etc I can see FB becoming even less relevant. FriendFeed, I find, is already a much better news/activity feed than FB and with out the ads and personal data mining!
that’s my 2 cents.
Nick-
Thanks for your post – and great Connect implementation. Wanted to make sure to say that we have not “demoted” application stories. There are hundreds of millions of impressions of stories from applications shown in News Feed each day. User-generated stories from applications are and have been a critical part of the information shared on Facebook since we first launched the platform. We spend a lot of time on ensuring that the information shared with friends in News Feed is most interesting to the users reading News Feed, and continuously reviewing the appearance and determination of what stories appear to make sure content generated through applications is shared in the streams on Facebook.
One thing developers can think about when building their applications or using Facebook Connect is how to best choose among the multiple ways to generate stories based on user’s actions to ensure that users share their stories and friends see them. With the new site design, we introduced multiple feed story sizes, and offered applications and Connect sites a way to easily show “Feed Forms” which allows a user to preview and choose what stories are published to their profiles. When a user explicitly chooses to publish a story, that story may appear in short or large size on their profile and in their friends’ News Feeds. Because the user intentionally published the story, that gives it added value in our Feed system and will increase prominence in a friend’s News Feed.