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Tag Archive: notifications

image thumb56 March 1, 2010: The Day When Facebook Notifications End

It ends, finally! All those notifications that bothered countless Facebook users like me irrespective we of the fact that we never really appreciated those apps being out there. The social network is now planning to pull those notifications off the system when March begins. Of course they wont just vanish overnight, but I am glad that they have given a date at last.

Of course This is going to dent the developers who have thrived on these flooding notifications that actively promoted their apps. But it is for the good of many users of the social network. I still receive dozens of notifications though I have blocked more than a hundred apps from sending me notifications, it just seems irritating. Plus it appears to be more of a harassment than a friendly app being promoted. What Facebook should do is provide these developers a better method to communicate with users. Something like a universal app dashboard or letting them get updates via email, more importantly users themselves should have the freedom to select how they should be contacted or updated about the apps.

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image thumb103 Developers Lose Big Chunk On Promotion As Facebook Murders Comment Reply Notifications

The status comments and comments in return of comments marching in numbers to my inbox bothered me big time. The idea to have it there was highly problematic to begin with as it kept bombarding you with notifications, however it is gone now. Thanks Facebook, as a user it has definitely removed the pain it caused me.

While I am here praising the move, the developer community is not happy. We all know why. I have no grudges against them or how their products benefitted from these notifications. This was already in the talks for the entire month as Facebook was always looking to put an end to notifications on user feeds, what might really be bothering them is the fact that hardly a few days back the social network had confirmed that they will not be making the move. So why exactly has been done and what was the issue?

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image thumb69 Facebook Cleaning Up Notifications, Going Live With Email API

As had been reported earlier, Facebook is going live with its Email API for applications. Thankfully enough, it will remove all those annoying notifications from the millions of apps that swarm the social network. The API is will alter how the apps communicate with the users shifting their mode from flocking your news feeds, etc to email. That too if you do want them to communicate via emails.

The notifications API will continue to function for another month, meaning it will be removed by mid February. While that does nothing good for users save for freeing you from notifications but developers would use the emails provided to notify you of the latest development about their apps and information. Plus data on what you have been doing using their app and be prepared to get reminders now and then in your inboxes if you haven’t used a particular app for quite some time. Well Facebook really wants to get the word across and it will be promoting the new API a the top of every apps page for the entire next month. The best part here is that Facebook will be providing its users with a Facebook extended email ID [xyx@proxy.facebook.com] to make sure that you don’t compromise sharing your personal email ID.

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image thumb118 Zynga Barks Back: Kill Popup Notifications Facebook And We Will Switch To SMS!

Facebook is taking steps to reduce certain things that make Apps on its platform a huge success. We reported one of them earlier as the social network rolled out new rules for Popup on Feed Forms. All this as said previously, will have its toll on the app traffics and I bet larger app developers are going to look for alternative ways to promote themselves and send notifications across as many channels as they can. Welcome Zynga that has been hugely popular with its winner app: Farmville and is now taking the steps for the same.

The social gaming developer today tested SMS notification to users. Meaning that users are being sent notifications from the social network right to their mobile devices. This has been rolled out primarily for the Mafia Wars and all this sums up to be a very good strategy from Zynga, which means it has to rely even less on Facebook. This is quite a bit of a break given that both Zynga and Facebook have been doing a lot for each other, not to mention that they have a common investor, Russian firm DST which has invested heavily in both Zynga (worth $180 Million) and Facebook lately. To be honest, this helps Zynga to be more independent on its own instead of relying so heavily on Facebook for all the promotion via notifications across the social network’s platform, etc.

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