Facebook Developers

The concept of bookmarks is given WAY too much weight.  Any app that is NOT bookmarked becomes really hard to find.  The worst part: click on "Edit All Apps" and what do you see?  Not all apps.  Just bookmarked apps.  Nobody will guess that you click on "Authorized" to REALLY see all apps.

"bookmarking" is the new "killer app", which explains the emphasis on the term.  The current system is unworkable.  See my post about "Show All" instead of "Edit All" and clickable widgets.

klister wrote:

The application bar is cool. But there is definitely an issue with bookmarking. My spouse plays Scrabble everyday but now she can't find the app, so I spent 15 minutes showing her how to bookmark. I'm sure she'll never bookmark another application (without me showing her how to do it).

If Facebook apps are more like webpages than applications (bookmarked not installed), then you need to include some features to make it easy to access recently used applications. Nobody will bookmark an app on their first visit.

In addition to bookmarks, your browser has a bunch of features to highlight recently visited pages:
- History
- Navigation drop-down with recent apps
- Auto-fill and Awesome bar

Please bring back (and put more emphasis on) recently used applications.

Agree the app bar is cool.  I think bookmarking is way easier to figure out than when it was on the app drop down menu, BUT I agree that users don't know about the 'bookmarking' concept.  I think recently used apps would be nice if they had a spot in the new bar, I don't know how I'd implement it though...

I would love to hear a response from a facebook rep

jonny5alive wrote:

The labels on functions are a giveaway that it is badly designed... should you have to put a big label on something or should it explain itself?

I agree that a design should be intuitive, but if you had even 200k daily users, you would understand how ridiculously inept users can be.  I get multiple anonymous TOS violation reports each day complementing my apps.  My face is right on the about page and I link to my about page with the title 'Help' in my navigation.

Thinking about the scope of the facebook userbase, I can not imagine the kinds of stuff people do.

Previous "recently used" included both bookmarked and non-bookmarked apps, making it repetitive and redundant. But recently used apps list should show only apps that are not bookmarked, so that if somebody forgets to bookmark they can visit the app again to bookmark that.

I just can't believe that they are going live with this in the next week, I am building an important commercial application and I do not feel that the developer tools or documentation are completed.

I agree that the bookmarking system is very difficult to find for the user and also think that they should provide a button just as they do for the profile box. 

I also think an else option should be provided for the <fb:if-section-not-added> tag as I believe it is important to know if a user has removed the box from the boxes page so that a database update or redirection can be made.

Traffic and earnings from my apps is down more than 50% since last one week.

Note the two days which have half the normal traffic - this is where Facebook servers were down or they pushed out broken changes to the platform. No significant changes have been made to the app in this period. This app had all the 'New Facebook' integration features in place before the changeover - feed, profile tab, profile_main etc. Plus this graph is for a really useful utility app with mostly repeat users and loads of positive feedback, not a throwaway game or quiz type app.

...Seems that Facebook application DAUs have correlated almost perfectly with the share price of Lehmann Bros.?

Last edited by chrisclaydon (2008-09-20 08:15:00)

Collin, that looks like a new app - it started at zero users so it could only go up! Doesn't tell us very much about the new profile.
Maybe it got onto the front page in the directory by whatever whacky algorithm selects 'recently popular' apps, or something like that? ... or it could just be that you were lucky and a user with thousands of friends added it and published a newsfeed.

Last edited by chrisclaydon (2008-09-20 10:20:20)

It would be more useful to post the graph of 'Unique Canvas Page Views', because that one is comparable before and after the switch - the DAU/MAU is not comparable because it now includes views of tabs. It's important to use the Unique Canvas views rather than just canvas views because one very busy user can view a lot of canvas pages and distort the stats if you just go on canvas views on a smaller app.

Last edited by chrisclaydon (2008-09-20 10:38:04)