Facebook announced their platform changes minutes after my posting and, as expected, fixed some of the problems I mentioned. They’ve introduced a new roadmap (there’s great overview of it with timelines on Inside Facebook). Overall I’m unsure exactly what the new plans they’ve laid out will mean for Facebook customers and developers. I think much of it is good (as does Eric Eldon at Inside Social Games), some of it possibly bad, and the majority depends on details that have not yet been decided and/or announced.
As far as Facebook user experience goes, it’s mostly a big win. They’re cleaning up the home feed so you’ll no longer be bombarded with friends’ quiz results. That’s good for everyone who wasn’t making a quiz app, and even those people had to know it wasn’t going to last. Facebook is too smart to let third parties degrade their user experience just to turn a quick buck for long. It lasted a few months, which shocked me. I figured they’d stamp it out sooner than they did, but I think it hit them by surprise (and won’t again) and they’ve initiated changes that will allow them to do so in the future. It’s unfortunate too because the feed, used properly by apps, could be great for developers, Facebook users, and Facebook itself, but as with anything so easily abused a race to the bottom occurred and ruined it for everyone.
Virality is the big issue for developers, and I’m not clear how this is going to be affected overall. Most apps other than quizzes don’t rely so much on the news stream as they do invites and notifications, so what happens there is going to have a much larger impact on highly engaging, highly viral apps like the ones we try to produce.
Notifications are going to pretty much disappear. User-to-user notifications are mostly gone, being moved to inbox messages that have to be approved by the sender, so there’s going to be a drastic reduction in those. I can live with that, since it’s something we game developers didn’t rely on overly much. Developers will push users to send Facebook messages where possible, but the fact that you’ll have to type each recipient’s name in by hand will make it much less frequent than invites now, which are easily sent to many friends with just a few clicks using Facebook’s invite selector widget.
App-to-user notifications, on the other hand, were a key driver of engagement. People on Facebook frequently install your app (along with 20 others) and then totally forget about its existence. In all of our games we use the app-to-user notification to alert customers that their special daily mission is now available, or something to that effect, and it has a huge impact. If we disable them for awhile, then turn them back on, it will often lead to a 50% traffic boost in one day.
In the long run, though, these probably have substantially less effect as people disable them or learn to simply ignore them, so again I don’t think they’re too key. And if their disappearance makes Facebook itself a little less spammy for everyone, it might be a long run win for all of us as well. The more people enjoy Facebook, the more they’ll use it, and the more they use it the more they’ll use apps built on top of it.
The real question, in my mind, is what is going to happen to invites. Facebook says “we’re going to consolidate invitations into a special section which will either be located in the Inbox, and/or in the Application and Games Dashboards.”
Implementation is key here. What I fear is that they add them to a special section of the Inbox, and don’t count invites toward the messages total. In that case someone with pending invites, but no other messages, won’t know they have unresolved actions waiting for them. Their screenshot indicates this will be the case.
As you can see, the user has 490 messages (really?) plus 9 updates and 2 invites, yet up top the count by Inbox shows only 490, indicating it excludes invites and updates. That’s really bad. On the other hand, the screenshot (which I’ve cropped slightly) actually indicates 4 invites, not 2, so it is possible that this is just a mockup rather than a screenshot of a functional implementation. Let’s hope that’s the case.
On the other hand, if invites are put in the Games dashboard, as it appears they are considering, and therefore are visible from the user’s home page by default, we may have an overall uptick in acceptance rates which could make up for lost virality on other channels. So I’m crossing my fingers on this one. It’s going to come down to details that apparently haven’t been decided on yet, and the implementation is going to be very key to virality on the platform.
It also appears as if invite texts may no longer be customizable. This will have the massive effect of getting rid of gifts sent via the invite message. That’s been a tremendous driver of both engagement and new users for a lot of games, and moving those to messages, where sending one-to-many becomes much more difficult, will have a massive impact. Developers will push these as hard as possible, and they’ll increase the load of messages in your inbox possibly to the extent that they’ll start annoying everyone, but the difficulty in sending them will ensure they don’t make up for losses on the other big channels.
It will also make app naming and icon selection more important as they will be the only thing differentiating your invite from the rest in someone’s inbox.
On the engagement side, the news seems mostly positive. Notifications been replaced by new dashboards that are enabled by default on the homepage and allow you to show users how many updates they have in your game. This is fantastic.
If there’s one thing people cannot stand, it’s seeing that they have new action items they have not yet resolved. It’s why the progress bars on LinkedIn make people who know they’re probably never even going to use that site again seek recommendations from friends. It’s why I think that inbox invites with notifications in the top bar are great, but without them are near-worthless.
Now if someone bookmarks your app (which they’ve even given us a new button to add to our nag screens to help them do) you’ll be able to bring them back to it better than ever before. That’s a pretty good thing for developers.
Also Facebook is now giving developers the ability to email users directly. I’m not sure how this is going to shake out. Getting customers to give you permission to email them is not trivial. Sending emails to large numbers of people without ending up exclusively in spam folders is not easy either. On the other hand, having direct communication, not limited and/or filtered by Facebook opens new doors. It will take some time for developers to figure out how to best take advantage of this, but we’ll get there.
So overall on the engagement front the changes may be a big win. On virality the verdict’s out, but it may be a small win, or it may be a loss. Potentially a huge one. I suppose we’ll know in a month or two.
A lot of developers think Facebook is out to kill virality in order to sell us users via advertising. Right now a lot of game makers buy traffic from Facebook’s self-serve ads. My company supplements our user growth with this, though the lion’s share still comes in organically. Increasing engagement (and therefore Revenue Per User) would enable developers to place higher bids on customers, resulting in higher CPMs on their ad platform, which are otherwise abysmally-low. Decreasing virality would make ad purchases a necessity to get traffic on the platform.
If that’s their goal, it’s a short-sighted one. It will be a huge deterrent to build on the platform and force developers back to simply building on the web. It will also lead to long-term stagnation. The story of the platform has so far been something like:
1. Guy in basement invents the next big app. At first it was pokes/gifts. Then RPGs. Then quizzes, and most recently farm games.
2. Big companies (lately mostly Zynga) copy them, improve, throw millions of dollars worth of marketing/cross promotional muscle at them.
Remove the guys in basements and who is Zynga going to clone? Once they’ve outbid all of us little guys, who do pretty much all of the innovating, for the traffic then what are they going to spend their ad dollars promoting? The little guys will lose because they won’t be able to afford the ad buys it takes to get traction. Customers will lose because platform innovation will slow drastically. Zynga will lose because they’ll run out of innovative new ideas to copy. And Facebook will lose because in the end they’ll end up with less ad sales, and less profit from the payment platform.
Moreover, it will result in significantly less overall traction on a platform that could probably monetize far better for Facebook through payment processing than ad sales. If Facebook made their payment platform public today, even at a relatively steep fee like 5% of sales I’d integrate it immediately. It would take a much larger platform for that to be a better business model than ads.
So in the end I’m all for Facebook trying to improve their own user experience, and I think in a lot of ways they’ll improve the platform by doing so. I just hope they manage to do it in such a way as to keep virality reasonable, spam low, and independent developers competitive. And if they just want to cash in on the big ad budgets of Zynga, EA, etc., that’s their prerogative. It’s their house, so I’ll pack up my toys and go somewhere else. There’s always that internet thing.
