While there was most definitely an initial hit to applications that thrived from the open Facebook feed, it appears that developers are already adapting and many have avoided a dramatic drop in traffic. It’s not surprising as last week I wrote that there would be blood but that developers would overcome the changes. It appears that many of those developers are already coping with the first in a series of changes.
So what changes are being made to adjust for the decreased visibility of user generated feed stories? One change (as noted by Justin Smith) is that developers are getting users to become fans of their pages. The reason is that large applications tend to attract many more likes and comments on feed stories, increasing the likelihood that they’ll end up in a user’s stream.
Unfortunately for developers the stream is ultimately a black box. While there are obvious variables that contribute to whether or not a feed story gets published, there are still a number of unknowns including Facebook’s own weighting system. Through extensive testing it would be possible to determine many of these things but as developers are already noticing, the volume of comments and likes have a big impact.
The number of user interactions with an object (person, page, or application) appear to be the single most important driver behind feed stories though. This means it’s going to be pretty hard to game the feed system. While we don’t know all of the adjustments being used by developers, we are currently reaching out to a number of them to see how they’re adjusting in addition to preparing for the impending updates.
We’ll be posting about that later, however in the meantime if you have any information on how developers are coping with the new changes, we’d like to hear from you. Email us via allfacebook [AT] gmail [d0t] com or comment in the post.
![[Inside Social Apps 2012]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/ISA2012_336x100_F_RegisterNow.gif)
![[AllFacebook Stats: Facebook Analytics for Your Business]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/stpro_allfacebookstats.gif)
![[How can Facebook change your business?]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/FMB_A_MAY2011_336x100_F.gif)
What is keeping Facebook from creating a FBML “Become a Fan” button?
They are planning on creating one for “Bookmarks” so why not a Fan button.
Very strange.
Comment by Carlos — November 3, 2009 @ 5:28 pm
Hoping you’ll talk about how brands are handling this issue too. This is a real chicken vs egg problem. I can’t get my posts into my fan feeds because I’m not getting enough likes/comments and I can’t get likes/comments because my posts aren’t in my fans’ feeds. WTF?!
Comment by meredith — November 3, 2009 @ 5:44 pm
The changes do seem to hinder the small, new and less established developers and help the big players. I'm going out on a limb here, but perhaps money is involved somehow.
I do prefer the old 'open feed', it used to be so easy to see everything about my friends and now its tiring to try and find out the same info.
Comment by pThomas — November 4, 2009 @ 2:39 pm