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It's been about three weeks since Facebook announced its Platform roadmap for the rest of 2009 through early 2010. It series of 19 changes primarily affecting the mechanics of and rules around Facebook's viral communication channels that applications use to spread and engage users. Last week, we took a look at what smaller developers are saying. The largest app developers are hard at work redesigning and re-optimizing their communication channel flows as a result of the new specs and policies. What are they saying about the changes?
1) Removal of app to user notifications
News of the removal of app to user notifications was pretty hard for many of the largest developers to initially stomach. However, while the removal of a channel that many have relied heavily upon will be rough in the short term, most understand that the channel has become clogged with spam and is losing value – both for users and developers. That hasn't stopped some developers from stuffing it as much as possible – but not all have. Soon, app-to-user notifications will be going away, and developers will need to primarily rely on email for app-to-user messaging.
Some of the largest developers, anticipating the need to control user communication more, have been driving users to share their email addresses for a long time by requesting user email addresses in their apps. Facebook now wants this to all happen directly between apps and users, instead of needing to worry about creating the right kind of allocation limits on developer use of the Facebook notification channel. Notifications will still continue to be used by Facebook directly for things like likes, wall posts, comments, and photo tagging.
2) Removal of user to user notifications, UI deprioritization of requests
While most developers ultimately agree that the removal of the current form of app to user notifications is a positive for the Facebook Platform ecosystem, there is deeper concern about Facebook's approach to user-to-user notifications and requests in the current roadmap. Developers argue that many user to user notifications are actually high-quality and engaging, so throwing the baby out with the bathwater (removing notifications and potentially burying invitations in the inbox) could actually be unhealthy for the Platform overall.
Preliminary screenshots released by Facebook show invitations being a third Inbox tab, behind Messages and Updates (from Pages). If this is the only place application invitations are surfaced, developers will see big decreases in conversion rates, and we agree that Facebook should provide a better access point for user-to-user application communication. Other proposed changes, like the user-to-user message composer, should drastically improve signal to noise in and of themselves.
3) Algorithmic News Feed, prohibition on auto-popup feed forms
Overall, while the largest Facebook developers are bracing for the pain of Facebook's new policy prohibiting the auto-popup of feed forms — a pretty aggressive practice some have become very accustomed to – they agree that an engagement-based algorithm that brings the highest quality feed stories to the front is the right direction for Facebook to take the News Feed.
Giving good air time to high quality app feed stories will decrease the incentive to pump out as many stories as possible to populate the real-time stream, as happened over the last few months. The user broadcast channel will still remain important when all the changes have taken place, there will just be many less feed stories published overall.
Conclusion
Overall, most of the largest developers agree that Facebook is moving in a positive direction with the changes overall to preserve the fidelity of its communication channels, and developers are very glad that Facebook announced a roadmap ahead of launching these changes. Nevertheless, there is still some significant concern over how exactly some of the changes will be implemented.
In addition, a couple developers are starting to grumble that Facebook is starting to look a little Microsoft-esque when making changes like the recent News Feed update in which Facebook now shows only one image by default in developer feed items, while still showing three images by default in its own Photos feed items. (Microsoft has been criticized for reserving proprietary APIs for itself over the decades.)
However, none of the larger developers are planning on decreasing investment in the Facebook Platform any time soon – in perhaps the most telling sign, they're all stepping development efforts up.
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