Last night Facebook made a relatively big announcement for developers: the company will be removing publisher attachments. The idea behind it was that applications could create custom attachments that would show up in the feed. According to Facebook the feature was getting little usage, however the concept behind it was pretty powerful. The equivalent in email would be making attachments that aren’t just files but interactive experiences.
Instead, Facebook will keep their in house attachments working, but developers will not be able to create new forms of attachments. Personally, I think this is a pretty significant change. While many developers failed to create useful attachment functionality, there was an opportunity to develop creative attachments. I won’t exactly be protesting the change, but developers can kiss one additional communication channel goodbye.
I’d be interested to hear from developers what sort of metrics they were seeing on their publisher attachments and whether or not they can confirm that the attachments were never being used. Do you care that the attachments are gone?
Update
The developer of Eyesores says that their users are posting nearly 15,000 attachments per day. He also claims that this could force him to close his application, although I personally think the developer will be able to cope, but it will definitely be a significant impact.
We rarely used it– curious to see who else cares.
Comment by Dennis Yu — July 2, 2010 @ 8:52 am
Nick this significantly affects SocialToo (http://apps.facebook.com/socialtoo), where we build a "publish to Twitter" from the publisher box. A significant amount of traffic comes from this (significant being in the thousands of visitors, so take it as you may). I'm pretty disappointed about this.
Comment by Jesse Stay — July 2, 2010 @ 9:08 am
I dont even know what facebook have changed. I never noticed it, whatever it is/was.
Comment by Ali Raza — July 2, 2010 @ 9:14 am
It is widely used feature, see related thread on the dev forum:
http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.ph...
Many apps do use and take advantage of it to create attachments. The story about low usage is simply not true. Maybe zynga doesn't use use it so FB feels free to announce low usage.
This is a sad day for the platform.
Comment by Anatoly — July 2, 2010 @ 9:42 am
I always tried to use certain ones on my friends birthdays and other special days. A lot of the problem that I saw was how facebook implemented what applications appeared in the list. There really wasn't any rhyme or reason to what appeared and often times the app I wanted wasn't available.
Comment by Facebook User — July 2, 2010 @ 9:45 am
Our users are posting the numbers similar to Eyesores
daily. The point that users can post not only on their walls but as well on their friends walls via the app attachments.
Comment by Anatoly — July 2, 2010 @ 10:04 am
Seems crazy to remove this feature. Lately seems like FB are trying to make cost-cutting changes, like limiting usage of their image and video CDN networks.
Comment by linto — July 2, 2010 @ 12:40 pm
I always tried to use certain ones on my friends birthdays and other special days. A lot of the problem that I saw was how facebook implemented what applications appeared in the list. There really wasn’t any rhyme or reason to what appeared and often times the app I wanted wasn’t available.
Comment by Facebook User — July 2, 2010 @ 1:45 pm
I think there could be death by 1000 cuts if googleMe, diaspora or some other platform gets their act together. As a developer, every step toward these restrictions pushes me further from facebook in the long run. If I only had a choice
Comment by Andrew Adashek — July 2, 2010 @ 9:28 pm
someecards uses this feature extensively. When you want to post to a friend's wall, you actually get sent to their wall (i.e. fb:publisher_link) and the attachment's UI is activated. That's used by about 1,500 unique users per day.
Attachments activated by a click on the down arrow is only about 50 unique users per day. But hardly "not used".
Facebook never got this quite right though. We've had numerous complaints that someecards just doesn't appear under the arrow.
Comment by Brent Baisley — July 3, 2010 @ 4:42 am
Another disappointing move by Facebook that will affect application developers and users alike.
Andrew, you definitely have a point. People bailed on MySpace in favor of Facebook. With the constant changes, I could easily see that same wave of users moving from FB to another platform if a solid contender came along.
Comment by Andrea Acailawen — July 5, 2010 @ 11:01 am
I have an app that's used thousands of times uniquely daily, too.
I spoke with one of the News Feed product managers at f8 about it. Looking back, his comments clearly indicate that Facebook has been considering this for a while now.
Because of this and my own experience with it, I'm disappointed, but not surprised. App development for this feature was very slim and not very inventive.
I'm mostly disappointed that Facebook just never really seems to have tried to get it right (like Brent mentioned). A small UI tweak could certainly boost usage, rather than declaring the feature a total loss and declaring EOL.
Comment by hotlou — July 6, 2010 @ 11:09 am
I agree, we are stocked with Facebook and got no choice, because we already have settled there with friends which they know which is why they now behave like Microsoft by limiting attachments. For instance you can't attach a simple picture on someone else's wall there is no a single "dislike" button beside [like] button. Don't be surprised if they demand money from normal users under the membership + stuff. Well the guy is a Linux guy made from fedora but configuration in this application is limitied as windows OS configuration. I don't get it.
Comment by Suat — May 5, 2011 @ 8:14 am