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| By Justin Smith | 5 Comments » |
Facebook is launching a redesigned home page next week focused on the Live Feed. What does this mean for application developers?
1. Increased News Feed distribution for application stories
The most important implication of the redesign is application feed stories published through Feed Forms are now guaranteed to be displayed on their friends’ home page, we understand.
If users share it, their friends will see it. That’s a big deal for developers trying to maximize the exposure of their feed stories in the News Feed. (One line updates will most likely not get syndicated to the News Feed.)
In other words, there is now a greater incentive for developers to provide compelling ways for users to share application information through Feed Forms on their Walls.
Two weeks ago, Facebook shared prelimiary mocks about the future of News Feed at the Palo Alto Developers’ Garage. There, Facebook began encouraging developers to start thinking about feed stories less as “third party journalistic news” and more like “first person updates.”
Facebook said that updates to Feed Forms will be coming soon where users will be prompted to add comments before publishing feed stories. It looks like the new Live Feed will show feed items in this new way whenever users add comments, so developers should encourage it.
2. Application bookmarks go away, application feed filters arrive
In the current Facebook home page, up to 6 application bookmarks exist on the right side of the page. However, in the redesigned home page, those bookmarks are no longer present, which will probably ruffle developers. The applications menu still exists in the menu bar on the bottom of the page.
However, Facebook has also added application News Feed filters on the left side of the page, under the friend list filters. Presumably, Facebook will show the apps that users share most with by default. Clearly, Facebook is increasing the emphasis on and incentives around sharing through applications with this update.
3. Application tabs for business profiles
Now that Facebook is merging business Pages with Facebook profiles, the way that applications can integrate with Pages is changing. Now, instead of integrating big custom boxes on the Page, Pages will default to a “Wall” tab which will be full of status updates and the other latest updates.
However, Page owners can now add custom application tabs to their profiles, which provide more real estate for applications. While application tabs will not be the default tab users see when they navigate to a business page organically, Page owners CAN drive traffic to application tabs through Facebook Ads. This means that application tabs could become the new “microsites” for businesses wanting to engage users within Facebook.
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March 4th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
You wrote, “In other words, there is now a greater incentive for developers to provide compelling ways for users to share application information through Feed Forms on their Walls.” I’d say, “There is now a greater incentive for developers to pester users to publish feed stories, because automatically published feed stories will no longer reach users’ feeds, er, streams.” I strongly suspect the main effect of this new policy will be an outbreak of apps that pester, pressure, or even try to trick users into publishing feed stories.
Even apart from this likely outcome, I question the wisdom of the policy. Facebook’s blog post announcing it says, “We encourage you to think about using Feed forms and prompting publishing of stories from within your application or website whenever appropriate.” Those last two words are indeed important. Most Facebook apps, and almost all the most popular ones, are games. How often is it appropriate for a game to ask a user, “Would you like to publish a feed story?” How often will this enhance rather than disrupt the user’s experience? Even for apps that aren’t games, it seems to me there are few occasions when asking a user to publish a feed story isn’t just distracting.
March 5th, 2009 at 11:07 am
[...] info can be found in Inside Facebook and this TechCrunch [...]
March 5th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
[...] What Facebook’s News Feed & Fan Page Redesign Means for Application Developers [...]
March 6th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
[...] Facebook announced a couple of days ago that they’re changing user’s homepages in a couple of significant ways to bring about more of a Twitter or Friendfeed-like environment of live sharing, and they posted some screenshots of what those updates will look like. Inside Facebook has the skinny here. [...]
March 17th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Will there be any way for an application to be developed that would take the place of the old “Live Feed”?
The old “Live Feed” option showed you not only your friends’ “status” messages, but also let you know when your friends made new friends (some of whom might be people you yourself want as friends!), as well as when your friends joined groups. Regardless of anything else, Facebook’s new layout fails because it doesn’t have these features.
What Facebook really needs to do is add the old “Live Feed” features back into its new design (and allow users to keep on using the old “Live Feed” until this retrofit has been done). But if they stubbornly refuse to do this, I hope it might be possible for someone to fill the void via an application.