AllFacebook - Latest Comments in Facebook Kills Application Excitement for Developers

Re: Facebook Kills Application Excitement for Developers

Jason Hanley — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:36:01 -0000

No, I developed my own little admin module that gives even better stats -- in real time! :)

Re: Facebook Kills Application Excitement for Developers

jyothirmayee — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 01:39:15 -0000

Hey Nick,
Almost after a day folks at facebook must have realized this displeasure and now we developers can sit and refresh "My Applications" Page instead :) That is where the number of users is displayed. It isn't all that bad after all.

However since only developers of the application can access this data, this means appsaholic cannot display hourly growth rate graphs. What they can probably do is write a plugin that can stay on developers browsers and send the #users stats to appsaholic. Credibility of data will be an issue though.

Re: Facebook Kills Application Excitement for Developers

Nico Lumma — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:11:40 -0000

well, there's always the possibility to track everything that is relevant to you and your app yourself. I find the daily update quite frustrating, but now that we know what and how facebook tracks, we can accumulate those stats ourselves.

Re: Facebook Kills Application Excitement for Developers

Nick — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:59:04 -0000

Active Daily Users is a skewed metric. It says nothing about the value an app provides. Measuring daily users will create a short term focus just like on Wall Street, unlike Buffett's very successful long term focus. Facebook should at least have weekly/monthly usage. For example Trips helps users plan the complicated task of planning a trip, yet trips are infrequent, giving them the low metric of 3% of active daily users. Though those active users are probably among the most valuable of any app, since they will spend money on hotels, car rentals, and air flights. Installations wasn't good either because a lot of people installed apps, such as Fun/Super/Advanced Wall apps, but hardly anyone used them. I am in no way related to Trips or the Wall apps, but I reference those apps as obvious examples that Facebook needs better metrics. How they can measure value is difficult though.

Re: Facebook Kills Application Excitement for Developers

Bryan — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:24:13 -0000

I'm a little disappointed, but I'll get over it. I hope to some extent they bring it back for Appaholic's sake.

Re: Facebook Kills Application Excitement for Developers

Tim Shephard — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:02:42 -0000

To be fair, we can get that data from our own local DB servers..