14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook apps and especially games have become an integral part of the social network's ecosystem but their success has taken even Facebook by surprise. The so-called social games on the site are bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue and the market is expanding rapidly. But one of the reasons for the expansion is the amount of spammy messages and notifications they have come to rely on and Facebook is now looking to put an end to that.
Still, the social network doesn't want to completely alienate the developers but at the same time it has to care for the user experience. So it has launched a “roadmap” for developers laying out some of the features and changes coming to the social network in the next months. The reason why Facebook is being so open with its plans is because some of the changes will greatly affect many apps and mostly in a bad way.
“[T]oday we are announcing a roadmap which includes a series of changes and improvements that will roll out over the next two quarters,” Facebook's Ethan Beard wrote. “These updates are designed to simplify communication for users and developers, improve app discovery and engagement, and provide you with more comprehensive tools for building or expanding your business with Facebook. Through these new APIs and tools, we are giving all developers building with Facebook and those in our largest application category — gaming — new ways to attract and engage users.”
Some of the changes were already being rumored and we covered them here but now they're coming straight from Facebook. A part of the changes affect communications involving apps as Facebook is moving for a cleaner experience. The notification and request channels will now be integrated in the Inbox and will lose their dedicated spots on the homepage. This is one of the most disruptive changes for apps as many relied on notifications to drive traffic up.
This comes after Facebook's latest changes to the News Feed, which now only lists the most popular stories by default, already affected many apps that depended on the entries in the News Feed to get new users. On the other hand, Facebook is now giving developers access to the user's email, with their approval of course, and encouraging them to engage their users directly. This just moves the app spam to the users' email inbox but it's not Facebook's problem anymore.
However, the social service is still looking out for the developers and is now creating a dedicated Apps Dashboard so users can find their favorite apps easily. Interestingly, games are finally getting a special treatment with their own dedicated Games Dashboard separated from the Apps Dashboard. Facebook believes this should be enough to counter the loss of the notifications but it remains to be seen whether app developers will be able to adapt.