To be honest, I’m not all that interested in how well my friends scored on some sort of Disney princess quiz. Yet Facebook still seems as likely to show me this as any other piece of news. Until now, anyway – the social networking site is altering its News Feed evaluation process.
Actually, I have no idea if this will affect the Disney princess app – I’ve never clicked on or near the thing. But apps that try to make users sign up in order to see some bit of information will definitely get hit. Justin Smith reports, “[F]eed items that link to pages that require adding the app to view will now get much lower Feed Rank than feed items that link to pages that can be viewed without adding the app.”
Maybe this is a teensy bit hypocritical, given Facebook’s whole walled-garden history, but the average user isn’t likely to complain. In fact, it seems that app developers are the only people who may regret this move, and Facebook hasn’t put their feelings first for quite some time.
On January 2nd, we reported that Facebook began blocking applications’ links. Just yesterday, there was an article about the ability to shove apps into a hidden corner of one’s profile. Now with this News Feed weighting, well – from a certain perspective, it almost appears that Facebook has declared war on its apps.
Meh. Again, users aren’t likely to mind, and Google’s OpenSocial has yet to provide much of an alternative.
