Inside Facebook

Following Facebook’s recent Platform roadmap announcements, there has been a lot of developer uncertainty about the best ways for applications to continue to communicate with their users. The many changes are going to affect all applications, but some smaller developers without marketing budgets are particularly worried about retention with users who don’t bookmark their apps.

Currently, applications can send something called an “application-to-user notification” to dormant users. When these notifications are removed (possibly as soon as December), these dormant or occasional-use users may be lost to an application forever. (A developer thread devoted entirely to the loss of application-to-user notifications can be found here.)

However there are some hints in Facebook’s announcements that may offer hope.

Application-to-user messages in the feed?

A phrase buried in the “Prominent new Dashboards” section of Facebook’s recent roadmap announcements names “an additional communication channel, called ‘News’ , where you can personalize text updates for users.” Does this offer the prospect of application-to-user stream stories? Early screenshots of the new design (below) may give another clue.

Notice how the “Games” tab is separated into two sections: “Your recent games” and “Your friends are playing”. The second (lower) section appears to be just the regular stream filtered by games applications, albeit grouped by application, but the top half is something new.

The wording of the examples shown in “Your recent games” is different than the other stories: they’re not activity stories published on behalf of other users, but rather they’re messages talking to the user directly. For example, “Your overall record is 50-33! Your rank is Wordsmith. You’re in 12th place, just behind Jonah!”

This is the kind of information that developers have been placing in application-to-user notifications to date, so will there be a new stream taking on this role? The idea generally conforms with Facebook’s aim of simplifying communication channels to the stream and the inbox, yet would mean there’s not the hard cut-off of app-to-user communication that developers had feared.

The precedent for application-to-user story communication

The idea of more “private” types of News Feed stories isn’t so much a new feature but rather the rebirth of an old one (reintroducing old concepts is not something Facebook has shown it’s averse to doing).

Not so long ago (prior to the June 2008 redesign) Facebook had a similar system in place where developers could publish two types of stories. The first type was for actions of the user that would be published to their profile page. These would also appear in their friends’ news feeds (subject to the feed algorithm). Applications sent these by calling the “publishActionOfUser” API method and they have effectively morphed into the stream stories of today.

The second type of story were for the user to see only and were called by the “publishStoryToUser” method. These would appear on the old “Home”, page mixed in with actions of friends, but were eradicated entirely in 2008.

Giving control to the users

This theory fits with Facebook’s vision of giving the user more control of their experience. If a user wants to play games and complete quizzes all day long, then they can, and applications can publish richly formatted messages in this way to keep them engaged and returning – all without filling up the feeds of their friends. This approach allows whatever apps are the most engaging to the user to have the most presence in this channel.

Additionally, the quality of News Feed stories is generally much higher than notification messages (which are text only and have only had space for little else than “Click here to find out more!” and other strong call to actions to date).

How the stories might be implemented

To speculate even further, these are a few ideas about how Facebook may go about balancing the needs of users and developers in a new implementation (and to reiterate, we have no confirmation on this).

• Applications will likely be limited to publishing only a small number of application-to-user messages per day to prevent spamming. Notifications were limited to one per twenty-four hours, and the previous app-to-user stories were allowed twice. So it seems reasonable to expect a similar level of throttling.
• Recently used (and authorized) applications would be able to publish to this feed without additional user action or permission, although this may be time-limited (to publishing within days or weeks of the user visiting the application). And it wouldn’t just be limited to bookmarked applications only – any recently used applications will be able to use the channel.
• The “News” channel will be private to the user and distinct from the stream of stories from friends (the rest of the News Feed), although the formatting may be very similar or even identical.
• There’s no sign that the stories will appear on the user’s default News Feed. Therefore, users will need to go into the “Applications” or “Games” tab to see them. This will likely make the channel less noticeable than the previous application-to-user stories, and certainly less visible than application-to-user notifications, although arguably those users who do actively check this will be the more engaged ones.
• Expect to see controls for “Hide all stories from this application” to combat misuse.

We’ll have to wait for more information from Facebook before knowing any of the above for sure, but there appears to be every reason to be hopeful that, although dramatic changes are afoot on the platform, developers aren’t being left as high and dry as they may have feared.