Facebook Apps and Games Dashboards On the Way
Facebook will be launching the Games Dashboard and the Applications Dashboard in the coming weeks. The company says these will make it easier for users to interact with their apps, and will provide new communication channels from the home page.
“Once launched to users, the dashboards will serve as a personalized destination on Facebook for users to interact with their favorite applications, discover news ones and receive application updates related to recent activity,” a spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews. “For developers, the Applications and Games dashboards will provide new opportunities for communication with users, as well as discoverability of their applications.”
On the Facebook Developer Blog, Jordan M. Alperin outlines the following features:
- Recently used applications and games: The top section of the dashboards will prominently display applications that a user has recently interacted with, making it easy to reengage with the applications they use most often. This section will also include a link to a page where users can see all of the applications they have interacted with, whether or not they have been bookmarked.
- News items: Applications will have the ability to display news stories, giving you the ability to communicate with your users and alert them to news related to your application, such as, “It’s your turn in a game against Jared” or “The leaderboard was reset 6 hours ago, come play!” You’ll have the option to set global news items, which will be visible to all users, or personal news items, which target a specific user. The news component will appear as a text field next to each application in the dashboard.
- Mentioning Users: Using simple syntax, you can render users’ names and links to their profiles in news and activities.
- Your Friends’ Recent Activity: The dashboards will display some of the applications that a user’s friends are using along with information about relevant activities within the application. You’ll set these activity stories via the Dashboard API.
- Your Friends Play: Another way we’ll help users discover new applications is by showing them a number of their friends who frequently use applications, and the applications those friends use.
- Directory: The Directory section of the dashboard will show the applications that currently appear in the “Applications You May Like” section of the Application Directory. We will also link to the Application Directory in this section.
- Suggestions: On the right hand side we’ll have a Suggestions area where Facebook will highlight applications we think users might like, based on the applications they and their friends are using.
- Counters and home page placement: “Games” and “Applications” links will appear on users’ home pages and will link to the dashboards, once the new home page launches to users in the coming weeks. Bookmarked applications will also have prominence on the home page, and can be accompanied by Counters that you can set to let users know there are actions for them to take within your applications.
Here is what the Games Dashboard looks like:
Earlier this week, Facebook announced that users can receive notifications from apps in their email. Also, they will phase out updates from apps in the notifications channel on Facebook.
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Facebook’s 2009 Scorecard Shows Huge Gains
Simply put, Facebook had a terrific 2009. This afternoon, comScore provided some statistics that cover the entire year, and the easiest way to sum them up is by saying that double- or triple-digit growth occurred in an impressive eight out of ten categories.
According to comScore, the total number of unique visitors to Facebook increased 105 percent between December of 2008 and December of 2009, hitting 111.8 million before the new decade began. At the same time, the number of average daily visitors increased by an even greater amount: 181 percent.
Meanwhile, the total minutes and total pages viewed stats rose 198 and 151 percent, respectively. Average usage days per visitor hit 10.4 (up 37 percent), average minutes per visitor totaled 246.9 (up 45 percent), and average visits per visitor reached 27.4 (up 64 percent). And total visits increased 236 percent.
The only sort of weak metrics were the average minutes per visit measurement (down 11 percent, probably due to people visiting the site so often), and the average minutes per usage day tally (up just 6 percent).
So Facebook’s certainly starting 2010 in a much stronger position than it entered 2009. And looking at the tail end of the line in comScore’s graph, it doesn’t appear that the social network’s stats are going to plateau anytime soon.
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Facebook Page Owners Getting More Stats
If you run a Facebook Page, you may be very interested in some new features that are rolling out for admins. Eric Eldon at Inside Facebook has discovered that some admins are starting to see impression counts for each post, as well as the number of likes and comments for each impression.
Eldon spoke with BrandGlue.com’s Jeff Widman , who is one of the admins that has so far been able to access this information (doing work for a site called Mint.com), and he says he is able to check things like how much the news feed algorithm weights individual items versus the fan page itself. He also says Pages are seeing “many more” impressions than fans. Eldon writes (and shows screenshots):
With Mint’s Page, for example, it has around 45,000 fans but a single post has more than 53,000 impressions. The 8,000 difference could be fans coming from the Page wall instead of their news feeds. But “it’s also a little uncertain where those 8,000 extra visits are coming from,” Widman adds, “as the Insights package shows less than half the 8K page visits since that post appeared. Perhaps it’s counting each time someone sees the News Feed? So multiple Facebook visits in a single day appear as multiple impressions?”
Facebook Pages have become an increasingly great way for businesses and web sites to generate traffic as well as customer engagement. Facebook also recently launched it’s answer to Twitter’s retweet, which means that content pushed through pages have a much better shot at being shared more frequently throughout the social network (which is much larger than Twitter I might add).
In other Facebook news, the company is getting into customized data centers and is now letting application users get notifications through email. This means developers can seek out your email address on an opt-in basis (not much differently than a web site would do).
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Facebook Gets Into Customized Data Centers
It’s always a big deal when a company like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft begins to build another data center; the move proves that they’ve got a fair amount of cash on hand and are growing at an impressive rate. More significant, though, may be the idea of a company first getting into the DIY data center business, and Facebook appears to have reached that juncture.
Rich Miller reported yesterday, “Facebook has decided to begin building its own data centers, and may announce its first facility as soon as tomorrow. The fast-growing social network has previously leased server space from wholesale data center providers, but has grown to the point where the economics favor a shift to a custom-built infrastructure.”
The facility Facebook’s rumored to be behind is under right now construction and will cover 117,245 square feet in Prineville, Oregon. Unless some seriously innovative construction techniques and types of hardware are employed, it’s sure to cost more than $100 million, and data centers often carry price tags along the lines of $500 million.
Then, when the construction’s done, Miller writes that it will take about 35 people to staff the data center.
So Facebook does indeed seem to be making a major move. We’ll try to relay more details as they become available.
UPDATE: Yep, it’s official.
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