Facebook is getting aggressive with a few developers who have been abusing the platform. Today the company alerted us to a “substantial” policy enforcement against the developers behind My Calendar, one of the largest Facebook applications. MyCalendar has been temporarily disabled and hundreds of other applications have been permanently shut down. According to Facebook, the developers have been engaging in misleading and spammy tactics in order to get more users rather than building valuable experiences.
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This afternoon Facebook is announcing an extended set of features for developers including a new Inbox API and Notification API. The first announcement is a big one: “The Inbox API allows you to access your users’ messages, once they grant your application the new read_mailbox extended permission.” That means we could soon see a ton of new applications built around managing users’ Facebook inboxes. The one downside of this new feature is that applications cannot currently send messages.
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Facebook posted their updated advertising terms last night and ultimately nothing was really that surprising. As far as I can tell, the only addition to the terms was around data and privacy. As previously was the case, developers cannot give any data received from Facebook to any third party. Additionally advertisements that include user data “such as users’ names or profile pictures” will require explicit authorization from Facebook.
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Zynga has been expanding the gap between them and competing developers now with over 60 million monthly active users when adding up the users across all their games. Playfish, the second largest application developer, has 35 million monthly active users, an impressive number however it’s still far from 60 million. So how does Zynga have such a dominant position on the platform?
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When the Facebook platform launched over two years ago, one of the first ways of generating revenue was by charging for application installs. Two years later, installs are still a relatively large business and at between 20 to 50 cents per install, Facebook ad networks are bringing in money one or two quarters at a time. Many clicks on Facebook cost as much as one install though so is it worth it to use Facebook to essentially buy installs?
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This morning while browsing through out our Facebook application statistics are, I noticed that the leaderboard had changed drastically. Many of the top applications were no longer appearing which didn’t make much sense. After browsing around I noticed that most Facebook applications were now reporting their monthly active users as 0. It’s a minor glitch but it ended up throwing off all of our statistics and developer stats are not being reported properly as well.
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A couple weeks ago I received a few emails about a new feature that had begun showing up for applications: quick transitions. The purpose of the feature is to speed up load time for each page. For those applications that are standard FBML applications, nothing needs to be done aside from checking a box within your application settings. For iFrame applications you may not have to make a change as many iFrame applications do not reload every time a link is clicked.
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Sprout, the widget creator, has announced its support for the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and OpenSocial earlier this week. The drag-n-drop process for Flash-based widget creation can be used for a widening array of purposes, including social media applications, which can now reside on the major social networking platforms.
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I spend a fair amount of time browsing through our Facebook application leaderboard to find what applications are growing on the platform. Every day it’s a different picture. Sometimes you find applications that are spamming the platform and other days you’ll find a really interesting application that you haven’t seen before. Regardless of type, there is still a huge potential to build successful applications on the Facebook platform.

While we’ve previously published buzz about the platform being dead, it’s currently far from it. The platform continues to thrive despite its occasional hiccups. Yes, there is controversy about honest versus dishonest developers but the fact remains that you can still build a popular application even with the new hurdles. Below are 13 strategies that you can use to immediately attract attention to your applications. Don’t be surprised if you use these strategies and your server gets overloaded with a massive onslaught of new users!
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Tonight’s announcement by Facebook was a huge milestone for the company. Developers have been calling for a more open platform and it looks like Facebook has finally decided to give it to them. Included in the updates is not only an open status API which I claimed would potentially kill Twitter, but also shared links which means we will soon see the rise of Facebook news aggregators.

Granted, we don’t have limitless access to shared links, but I think aggregation will really be the key thing resulting from these new features. Through the power of Facebook Connect, companies can also rely completely on Facebook for hosting videos, photos, status updates, news articles, and more. Additionally, this new open layer will allow Facebook Connect communities as well as communities within the platform to create their own content aggregators.
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