Facebook Kills Application Excitement for Developers

You launch your application and start refreshing your application page to see how many installs you have. This is the same thing that people frequently do with their blogs. They sit there and constantly check the statistics about their applications. Appsaholic and Appaholic (now Adonomics) were both created for this purpose. Users could check out the hourly updates of application subscription rates. It was addictive!

Now they have removed this feature. Facebook only updates their statistics on a daily basis now. While you can still track the popular developers and applications you can’t sit and refresh. That’s what makes many of these analytics sites entertaining is the ability to watch hits happen in real-time. I feel like a lot of that is gone now. Truthfully though, there is never much use in refreshing the page anyways. Are you disappointed by Facebook’s metric changes?

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40712 Comments2007-08-30+20%3A40%3A40Nick+O%27Neill »

To be fair, we can get that data from our own local DB servers..

Comment by Tim Shephard — August 30, 2007 @ 1:02 pm
I'm a little disappointed, but I'll get over it. I hope to some extent they bring it back for Appaholic's sake.

Comment by Bryan — August 30, 2007 @ 1:24 pm
Active Daily Users is a skewed metric. It says nothing about the value an app provides. Measuring daily users will create a short term focus just like on Wall Street, unlike Buffett's very successful long term focus. Facebook should at least have weekly/monthly usage. For example Trips helps users plan the complicated task of planning a trip, yet trips are infrequent, giving them the low metric of 3% of active daily users. Though those active users are probably among the most valuable of any app, since they will spend money on hotels, car rentals, and air flights. Installations wasn't good either because a lot of people installed apps, such as Fun/Super/Advanced Wall apps, but hardly anyone used them. I am in no way related to Trips or the Wall apps, but I reference those apps as obvious examples that Facebook needs better metrics. How they can measure value is difficult though.

Comment by Nick — August 30, 2007 @ 1:59 pm
well, there's always the possibility to track everything that is relevant to you and your app yourself. I find the daily update quite frustrating, but now that we know what and how facebook tracks, we can accumulate those stats ourselves.

Comment by Nico — August 30, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
To be fair, we can get that data from our own local DB servers..

Comment by Tim Shephard — August 30, 2007 @ 5:02 pm
I’m a little disappointed, but I’ll get over it. I hope to some extent they bring it back for Appaholic’s sake.

Comment by Bryan — August 30, 2007 @ 5:24 pm
Active Daily Users is a skewed metric. It says nothing about the value an app provides. Measuring daily users will create a short term focus just like on Wall Street, unlike Buffett’s very successful long term focus. Facebook should at least have weekly/monthly usage. For example Trips helps users plan the complicated task of planning a trip, yet trips are infrequent, giving them the low metric of 3% of active daily users. Though those active users are probably among the most valuable of any app, since they will spend money on hotels, car rentals, and air flights. Installations wasn’t good either because a lot of people installed apps, such as Fun/Super/Advanced Wall apps, but hardly anyone used them. I am in no way related to Trips or the Wall apps, but I reference those apps as obvious examples that Facebook needs better metrics. How they can measure value is difficult though.

Comment by Nick — August 30, 2007 @ 5:59 pm
well, there’s always the possibility to track everything that is relevant to you and your app yourself. I find the daily update quite frustrating, but now that we know what and how facebook tracks, we can accumulate those stats ourselves.

Comment by Nico — August 30, 2007 @ 6:11 pm
Hey Nick, Almost after a day folks at facebook must have realized this displeasure and now we developers can sit and refresh "My Applications" Page instead That is where the number of users is displayed. It isn't all that bad after all. However since only developers of the application can access this data, this means appsaholic cannot display hourly growth rate graphs. What they can probably do is write a plugin that can stay on developers browsers and send the #users stats to appsaholic. Credibility of data will be an issue though.

Comment by Jyothirmayee — August 30, 2007 @ 8:39 pm
Hey Nick,

Almost after a day folks at facebook must have realized this displeasure and now we developers can sit and refresh "My Applications" Page instead That is where the number of users is displayed. It isn't all that bad after all.

However since only developers of the application can access this data, this means appsaholic cannot display hourly growth rate graphs. What they can probably do is write a plugin that can stay on developers browsers and send the #users stats to appsaholic. Credibility of data will be an issue though.

Comment by Jyothirmayee — August 30, 2007 @ 9:39 pm
No, I developed my own little admin module that gives even better stats — in real time!

Comment by Jason Hanley — August 31, 2007 @ 4:36 am
No, I developed my own little admin module that gives even better stats — in real time!

Comment by Jason Hanley — August 31, 2007 @ 8:36 am