While many of Facebook updates may actually make users think that their privacy settings are fooled around with, others make them feel they are more in control. Earlier Facebook pushed its feed forms live for users making sure all that pops out is what users want. While it might be good for someone like me, but not so for the developers out there.
Why?
Well the developers have been relying heavily on the auto pop out of feeds on user profiles that provided them a very high probability of users actually engaging with their content/applications. No more popup boxes that asked you to publish the content on their profiles of course unless users really want that to happen. To be honest this has been one of the major reasons why the many apps have actually gone from rags to riches; by making way into user profile streams every time the user engaged with those.
So What Does This Mean?
First and foremost, any app that has wriggled to high traffic scores taking advantage of a more default appearance on News Feed will see a plunge in traffic. Of course this won’t happen immediately, but will take some time and there is evidence of certain apps already taking a hit as monthly traffic fell short with high chances of they taking a further plunge.
That is just one of the step that Facebook has taken on its policy roadmap as it tries to further improve the Facebook platform. All these are to be the part of Facebook embracing more open standard and we saw one of them yesterday when it talked about testing its OAuth WRAP on FriendFeed. Some of the other changes that are bound to roll out early next year include:
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Improvements to Application Discovery and Navigation: this would include application dashboard.
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Open Graph API
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Communication channels: includes Requests, invites, notifications.
The whole picture looks pretty good primarily because the social network is making its developer platform for transparent to everyone out there. The year to come looks impressive enough already with the social network predicted to churn out very healthy revenues.
