Facebook Application Notifications End Today
From a personal point of view I am delighted that Facebook will finally stop allowing application developers to send notifications to people from apps from today onwards. It means that when I log in to Facebook I won’t have 50 useless notifications telling me that my friends are playing scrabble or that somebody has added me to some spammy photo calender app. Facebook will today remove these notifications and make developers think of new and innovative ways of having to engage their users but as much as I like the idea personally I would be up in arms if I was a developer with a successful app or a brand trying to attract users through apps as this just complicates the process and removes that “viral” effect that apps creators rely on to spread word about their apps.
Facebook has released communication channels best practoces to help developers migrate over to the new system but there is bound to be confusion and less interaction with apps over the coming days as these new changes take hold. New app requests will not move to your inbox in a step that is set to further anger users who already find their Facebook inbox full of noise and spam.
The move is controversial but then due to it’s sheer size and amount of users so is every change Facebook makes these days. It is just another step in Facebook’s step to clean up the homepage and make it a better user experience with less clutter and better “real time” information and a heavy emphasis on search. Applications are not going to go away as they form a key part of the engagement strategy on Facebook but they are going to be slightly more hidden from today onwards. What do you think? Are you glad to get rid of the noise?
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