Posts tagged Facebook news
How one app out performs another…
Nov 2nd
We’ve just concluded an interesting facebook application experiment. We took two simple apps that were both built on the same basic code. They picked a random phrase and output it along with a random number.
We made one application a “fortune cookie app” which gave the user a lucky number and an amusing and often nonsense phrase like you would find in a real fortune cookie.
The other was a much more morbid ‘how and when will I die?’ application which used the random number to tell the user how many years they had left to live and the random phrase became the predicted method of death.
We got two facebook users (members of our team) to spend 15 minutes a day promoting by joining groups and publishing feeds to their wall, etc. Both members had roughly the same number of friends on their lists, etc. To keep it even more fair they would swap apps each day so if one was slightly better at promoting that than the other it should all even out.
The results on the growth of the two apps was astonishing…
Be cautious when buying apps…
Oct 30th
Further to our post about the new feed system for Facebook, it should be fairly apparent that most of the apps for sale still use the old template system which will cease working in less than two months time.
What is more worrying is that when we test emailed some app writers many of them don’t believe they have to change anything and others don’t offer any support for their apps or don’t include support that would include code changes for the feeds.
We would strongly advise that you don’t buy any app that has not already been changed to use the new steam publishing method. If in doubt ask to see the installation instructions for their app and if it involves registering feed templates then pass on it unless you have scripting experience yourself and are happy to make the code changes if the original author isn’t.
There is no reason for anyone to be selling applications that have not already been changed. The code changes are straightforward and can be implemented very quickly.
Facebook Simplify Streams but depreciate existing system in under 60 days.
Oct 23rd
Facebook announced today that they are changing the way that feeds work. The full facebook announcement can be read in their developer blog at Facebook Development Blog.
Here are the key points in English along with a few questions that the documentation doesn’t do a great job of explaining.
First of all there are now two views a user can have, one is a news feed which is basically posts that a facebook algorithm determines are the most interesting. Things like how many comments, how unique it is and how many people ‘like’ the post will play some part. In their words…
* News Feed will focus on popular content, determined by an algorithm based on interest in that story, including the number of times an item is liked or commented on.
* Live Feed will display all recent stories from a large number of a user’s friends.
OK, so far so good, except you can expect to lose some viral traffic where users only view the news feed and facebook has not flagged your feeds as worthy enough to make it. However according to facebook if these are engaging and interesting then you have nothing to worry about. Of course how interesting anyone can claim ‘Joe Bloggs has made it to level 5 in the big magic spoon game’ is purely subjective.
The biggest concern is that they are depreciating the template feed system by December 20th 2009.
Hundreds of thousands of applications out there all need to be changed in the next two months! And considering the documentation is hard to follow at best they are not making it easy for the little guys. But do not fear! We can break it down into English for you. Read the rest of this entry »