Facebook has announced that they will be launching new metrics for applications. The new metrics include the number of users active with your application in the past week and the total number of canvas page views. They’ll also “provide aggregated statistics around how many people have added the various integration points for your application — your application tab, profile box, and application info section — as well as who has subscribed to email or bookmarked your application.”
The number of email subscribers will be displayed because email is no longer enabled by default. Instead, users will need to opt-in to emails from your application. This is a substantial change which will significantly impact the growth of applications since many were using spammy techniques to promote their application. For those that weren’t spamming users, growth could be substantially stunted.
Facebook has also suggested that developers adjust the way applications require users to login. Rather than adding the application, Facebook prefers that developers let users login first to view the application before they permanently add it. Whether or not this is a good thing, Facebook has made a lot of changes over the past few weeks leaving developers to scramble to make changes. If you are in the business of developing Facebook applications full-time, you will now find yourself spending more time adjusting your applications to changes than building out new features.
Part-time developers are feeling the changes even more as they have limited time and there are more and more changes every day. While these new metrics will be useful, it’s currently time to focus on making the applications work under the newly designed platform. Do you think all these changes are making it tougher for developers?
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I'm one of those part-time developers with limited time, and yes, all these changes are definitely making it tougher for me. For example, my application Evarium (http://evarium.com) is crippled without a profile box, and users are now (or will soon be) obliged to push a button in order to authorize a profile box. So rather than streamlining the add process, which is a proclaimed goal of the recent changes, they're actually adding friction to it as far as Evarium is concerned. I'm not impressed.
Comment by Ralph Haygood — June 2, 2008 @ 11:15 am
I’m one of those part-time developers with limited time, and yes, all these changes are definitely making it tougher for me. For example, my application Evarium (http://evarium.com) is crippled without a profile box, and users are now (or will soon be) obliged to push a button in order to authorize a profile box. So rather than streamlining the add process, which is a proclaimed goal of the recent changes, they’re actually adding friction to it as far as Evarium is concerned. I’m not impressed.
Comment by Ralph Haygood — June 2, 2008 @ 4:15 pm