Despite casual public acknowledgement of the impact of Facebook killing off notifications, many developers have been scrambling behind the scenes. The reason is that Facebook’s upcoming changes make it practically impossible for developers to re-engage users after they’ve visited an application for the first time, unless they bookmark the application. Yesterday I suggested that Facebook’s new Bookmark button would help curb some of the impact of the upcoming changes. At the time we failed to notice one other subtle change by Facebook.

Yesterday afternoon Kelly Winters of Facebook updated the Roadmap Counter page to include the following statement: “we are still designing exactly how Counters will be displayed beside non-bookmarked apps”. This should be a massive relief for those developers trying to figure out how to avoid the impact of daily churn without a way to re-engage users.

For those that don’t have a complete understanding for how the new design will work, the idea is that only bookmarked applications would show up on the homepage (as pictured below) and any updates will show up as a counter. It’s fairly similar to how the iPhone functions, however there’s one problem: if you install an application and don’t bookmark it, there’s no way of finding out that you should take an action within the application.

This means users may install a bunch of applications but they’ll never return to the majority of them. It also means that developers have one shot to get the users to bookmark the application. If the developer fails to convert the user, they should expect the user to never return (unless of course the application was highly memorable). Fortunately for the developers, Facebook is now working on a solution.

So for those developers that were pulling out their hair as they thought the end of notifications meant the death of the platform, don’t get too stressed out! Facebook is working on a solution for you.