Well, it’s official, Facebook has moved over to its new layout. But what does that mean for both home users and developers? Facebook has obviously made some changes that can both irritate application developers but also can be taken advantage of to really refine the end user’s experience.

Facebook seems to be making big steps towards allowing users to really capitalize on applications that they use a lot by putting them front and center. Users can now add tabs to their profile to make certain applications easier to access and also allowing users to bookmark the applications they use the most for easy access.

From a developer’s point of view, this is going to be a little brutal for the vast majority of developers out there. In order to finance application development, most developers focus on getting as many people installed on their application as possible and then spamming the heck out of them with messages, notifications, advertising and profile advertising. The problem with the new layout is that it allows users to completely shut off everything they do not want to see from an application which seriously cuts down on the viral effect of a lot of applications. What does this mean to most application developers? Reduced revenue.

There are some added advantages to developers with an application that people use quite frequently. The most evident is the tabbing section. It allows users to add a tab with special content served from the application. So, for the special few applications that a user uses most, that application has the opportunity to become very predominant on a user’s profile page.

However, with the obvious reduction of incoming revenues, most developers are a little angry about this move. Rumors have been flying all around the Internet about Facebook releasing some sort of a payment system whereby developers can charge for their application’s services. With the obvious reduction to revenues hitting developers, it is sort of strange that Facebook hasn’t gone ahead and released this platform yet. As a developer, we need business models such as this one to stay alive, where is the love Facebook?

All in all, I think the new profile switch is a good move for the Facebook experience but I think Facebook is going to have to start making some moves to improve their development platform for developers so that they can still get a decent ROI from development. The good news is that Facebook obviously has something in the works and for those thinking about building a business model around paid installs, it might be a good time for such ventures to get started. And hey, for a shameless plug, come to us, we would love to build it for you!

Tags: application, development, facebook, layout

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 9:25 am and is filed under Facebook Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.