Inside Facebook

Facebook is about to start offering application developers a little more “Insight” into the way their Notifications work.

Starting later this week, applications will no longer have a fixed limit of 40 Notifications per user per day. Instead, the Notifications limit will be dynamic, moving up or down according to the number of users who hide or report Notifications as spam.

While the Notification “spamminess” formula remains unpublished, “We hope this change incentivizes developers to improve the quality of their notifications and encourage their users to send notifications to interested friends,” Facebook’s Tom Whitnah said. “While there is a general correlation between good response rates and higher thresholds, other factors and metrics will be used to determine these scores as well and the allocations will adjust themselves accordingly.”

In addition, Facebook will be adding two new metrics to application Insights this week. The first will tell developers what the current Notification threshold for their application is. The second will provide performance metrics on how much users are responding to your app’s Notifications.

This marks the first time Facebook has provided performance metrics for one of its key viral channels - a moment I’m sure the developer community will celebrate. Until now, some have rolled their own systems, but many developers have not done anything.

Giving the entire developer community a deeper understanding of what’s working with their use of Facebook’s viral channels will definitely lead to an improvement in overall Notification quality. Facebook should continue to add metrics for all channels for developers - it only makes things better for everyone.