Yesterday, Facebook made a very smart adjustment in how they rank the most popular apps in their user directory.
Now, rather than rank the most popular apps based on the total number of people who have added them to their personal pages, Facebook is ranking the apps based on the total level of user engagement of that specific app each day.
So how does Facebook calculate engagement?
Facebook is defining engagement as "the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight). The touch points are: Canvas Page Views, Link Clicks in FBML, Mock-Ajax Form Submission, Click-to-Play Flash"
It's these seemingly little things that Facebook does that continues to impress me. Moving away from putting the emphasis on installs, and shifting the focus to actual interactions means that developers can't hide behind deceiving numbers.
I completely agree, Marc. It also will hopefully shift developer focus to building truly engaging applications that add value versus ones based simply on being forwarded as much as possible.
Posted by: Chris | August 30, 2007 at 07:42 AM