Sunday, June 29, 2008
New Facebook Metrics Herald a New Era
New metrics were announced on June 17, and were provided in the new PHP library rolled out on June 25. These metrics provide 7- and 30-day metrics to use in evaluating an app.
A key part of the June 17 announcement is this paragraph: "These two metrics [7- and 30-day metrics] are very important for many applications, as not every good application has its users interacting with them on a daily basis. Rather, they can be just as engaging when a user interacts with them regularly every few days or even a few times a month. For example, applications with many users that highlight rich content like books or movies might not see as much relative activity on a daily basis as applications with higher daily usage, but their overall metrics increase when the activity window is extended over longer periods of time."
With the initial opening of Facebook platform, a land rush was on for daily users. Despite that hoopla, some of us pointed out that there was value--often tremendous value--in small-scale apps. While there's room for both big and small apps, I take the paragraph quoted here as a positive sign of maturation in the world of Facebook apps. There has always been some concern that this all might be a fad, but the growing number of apps with rich content and consistent but periodic use suggests that concern is less relevant than it might have been a year ago.
A key part of the June 17 announcement is this paragraph: "These two metrics [7- and 30-day metrics] are very important for many applications, as not every good application has its users interacting with them on a daily basis. Rather, they can be just as engaging when a user interacts with them regularly every few days or even a few times a month. For example, applications with many users that highlight rich content like books or movies might not see as much relative activity on a daily basis as applications with higher daily usage, but their overall metrics increase when the activity window is extended over longer periods of time."
With the initial opening of Facebook platform, a land rush was on for daily users. Despite that hoopla, some of us pointed out that there was value--often tremendous value--in small-scale apps. While there's room for both big and small apps, I take the paragraph quoted here as a positive sign of maturation in the world of Facebook apps. There has always been some concern that this all might be a fad, but the growing number of apps with rich content and consistent but periodic use suggests that concern is less relevant than it might have been a year ago.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Important Change to Facebook Feed Stories
Facebook now allows the HTML script tag in story templates. This has two important consequence. FIrst, you can include JavaScript in story templates. This significantly increases the functionality. The second change is that the delimiters for tokens in stories change from { and } to {* and *} to avoid confusion with JavaScript delimiters. Existing templates still work, but new ones require the new token syntax (and can take advantage of the HTML script tag).
More info here.
More info here.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Open Source Facebook
A year after opening the platform to developers, Facebook is opening much of the Facebook Platform code as well as the implementations of many methods and tags. The downloadable code is here.
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