The Facebook homepage used to be a viral dream for application developers. Users would login and see which apps their friends had installed in the middle of the various relationships breakups. Your futur users did not have to look for you, you could rely on their friends to broadcast information about your application. Each time a friend of a friend was installing your app, their friends would be notified and so on. Free viral marketing!
The homepage would behave like Google News in a way. It was a summary of what was happening behind the curtain, inside each profile, saving the user's time. They could look at the headline, get a snapshot of what was happening and, if something was relevant to them, jump in and enter their friend's profile or install your application just as John or Olga did.
All this has changed since the rollout of the new homepage. If a user wants to know which application her 538 friends have installed, who is now friend with who, who is now single or no longer on the market, she will have to visit each of their profile. The homepage is now just an advanced clone of Twitter broadcasting what's on your friends' mind and no application is visible. Imagine if Google News decided to remove the Tech and the Sport sections!
What used to be the best distribution channel for developers of social networks applications is now completely useless.
So who is benefiting from this new interface? Not the applications developers obviously. Not the user either whose discovery mechanism has just been emasculated. Maybe Facebook in its apparent desire to kill Twitter. The applications were supposed to make the site stickier. Removing them from the homepage is, I think, a mistake and I'm curious to see if the growth rates of applications adoptions will stay the same. I bet not.
Ultimately this is a proof that relying on the availability of some 3rd party's APIs for the future of your company is inherently wrong. Yes tapping into opened APIs is great for some things but handing over the control of your key success parameters (monetization engine, distribution channel, user's data) is way to dangerous. If you do not own your users nor the route to them, you're at the mercy of your partners and that, brother, is bad news.
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