In a blog post last Saturday, Pete Bratach stated that “We now count tab views toward your applications’ active users. The count occurs on the initial page load of the profile, in addition to a user explicitly clicking the tab.” It was a minor change but one that could potentially inflate application metrics substantially.
Previously active users were not counted until the user actually interacted with the application. That could include clicking on a profile box but now it just represents a user viewing the “Boxes” tab. For those few individuals that actually visit the “Boxes” tab, I’d guess that they aren’t viewing every box on the page. Ultimately this ends up inflating the active users as far as I can tell.
Then again, I don’t even navigate to the “Boxes” tab on friends’ profiles but I do know that in order to view all the boxes on my page you would have to navigate well below the fold. So why has Facebook decided to switch to this new metric? Honestly I have no idea. The only rationale I can think of is to artificially boost the active user metrics for applications.
Does Facebook really have an incentive to boost active users within applications? Well it makes sense in terms of Facebook wanting applications to look more popular than they are in order to drive new developers to the platform. I doubt this is the rationale though. Facebook already has plenty of popular applications and it doesn’t make sense to inflate the numbers any more.
Update
Josh Elman posted a comment below clarifying what was taking place. As he states “In the cases discussed above, an ‘active’ user of an application is counted only when a user views a profile with the specific application tab selected.” In other words the “Boxes” tab is not being considered for active users unless a user actually interacts with that box.
I saw this, tried to look into it further, but can’t understand it at all. Is it really talking about views to the Boxes tab? Or only application-specific tabs? Does it actually occur on the initial page load of the profile (the main wall tab), or is it only when the user clicks on Boxes (or only when the user clicks on the application-specific tab).
If any of these were true, surely there would be a sizable jump in users on the specific day that they turned it on – but my application doesn’t show one at all even though it has lots of boxes and lots of application specific tabs.
Finally, the link in the blog post about these new stats changes goes to this push changes page, which as far as I can tell says nothing at all about it: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Push_Changes_-_Jan_06_2009
Comment by David — February 6, 2009 @ 2:14 pm
Hi Nick,
I want to correct some misperceptions in this post. In the cases discussed above, an “active” user of an application is counted only when a user views a profile with the specific application tab selected. The change referred to in this post only referred to us now accounting for the case when a user visits a profile via a link that automatically selects the tab. Previously, users who viewed a tab that way had not been considered “active” users. There is no accounting for “active users” on a view of the “boxes” tab unless the user specifically interacts with a profile box.
In addition, the link referenced above was corrected to point to the correct push changes: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Pus...
-Josh
Comment by Facebook User — February 6, 2009 @ 6:04 pm
Ah! Thanks a million for the clarification Josh. I'll post an update to the post.
Comment by Nick ONeill — February 6, 2009 @ 6:07 pm