As part of the Developer Roadmap Facebook announced in October, Facebook described new Applications and Games “dashboards” all users will soon see by default in their home page bookmark menu. As we observed a couple weeks ago, the dashboards contain new ways for developers to publish content to users that don’t fit into the concepts of feed stories, notifications, or invitations. Today, Facebook has released new details on how exactly the dashboard APIs will work.

The Dashboard News API

With the new dashboard, Facebook is introducing the concept of “dashboard news.” By default, the dashboard will show the 3 games or apps you used most recently, as well as 3 games or apps your friends are playing. Within each of these listings, Facebook says it will show the 2 most recent “dashboard news items,” in addition to the counter for that app.

What’s a “dashboard news item?” Good question. According to Facebook, there will be 2 types of dashboard news items: global and personal.

• Global news items are sent to all your application users when you call dashboard.setGlobalNews.
• Personal news items are sent to users you specify when you call dashboard.setNews.

In other words, it sounds like Facebook is intending that application developers use “personal news items” as a partial substitute for user-to-user notifications, as these are indeed a new app-to-user channel. However, unlike notifications, 1) there is no unified inbox, and 2) only the two most recent news items are shown, meaning the read rate and conversion rates could be lower. For example, if you send a user two “personal” news items, and then publish a “global” news item, the first personal news item you sent will apparently be lost forever.

Each dashboard news item is displayed with an icon and action link in the current mocks. “There is no sandbox for the Applications and Games Dashboards, but you can test this API on your own servers,” Facebook says.

Ultimately, developers are interested to see how large of a role the new dashboards will actually play in application retention. In the past, because the notifications inbox was not split up per-application, and there was no cap on unread notifications, many users received dozens of app-to-user notifications per day, and many developers simply published as many as they could.