Regional Networks Soon to be Deprecated in Platform APIs
As Inside Facebook reported last month, Facebook is in the process of migrating away from regional networks on the site (they were only ever used by 50% of users anyway, and created some unintended privacy confusion). As a result, network affiliations are being migrated to the Info tab on user profiles as users’ current locations.
For developers, Facebook says that these changes will eventually be reflected in their API. If your application currently makes use of regional networks, you have until September 30, 2009, to make the official change to use the current_location field instead of network affiliations.
This process isn’t without its quirks, however. As pointed out on the Developer’s Forums, the new user-defined city field could be less useful than regional networks as it will likely actually create more segmentation. Any attempt to group like cities together would be at the expense of the application developer.
July 6th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Facebook could leave Regions in-tact by developing it’s own Region subsets based on Locations listed by users.
The idea of removing users does actually take away one element of segmentation, and a possible advertising advantage for Facebook. By allowing users to be sorted by Regions, for advertisers, it could allow regional companies better control over who their ads are displayed to.
Granted, that’s assuming utilization of Regions by Facebook users. Facebook could, in fact, group regions itself in the back-end based on its own data. It would add even further value to the Facebook marketing platform.
July 6th, 2009 at 10:20 am
I agree with the notion above. It would seem prudent that Facebook attempt to group “region” info data together. Group them by an ID number for developers, and a name for advertisers.
This isn’t unlike the system they already had in place, just the concept behind it has changed.
-Mike