Unfortunately, you are not comparing apples with apples. When an app is first released and is gaining lots of new users the DAU % will be higher than that of an app that has been in the directory for an extended period.

If you wanted to compare them you would really need to pick a date towards the end of the season or several months in. The other apps you talk about would have had similar rates in their early stages. My own app was 50%-75% for the first week or so, but has settled to just less than 10%. Also not all apps are ‘daily use’ type apps, this doesn’t make them bad or unuseful just not high on that one metric.

Also, “spam-like applications” – haven’t been defined to the developer community by Facebook. How many emails would you classify as spam that were sent by your friends who knowingly hit the send button (i.e. not a script virus)? This is one of the problems, invites are user generated, other things in the news-feed are application generated (such as notifications) – however in both cases applications have quota’s (well below the 100 allocated to the app in question).

Yes I agree there are a lot of crappy apps in the directory, but guess what Facebook approved them for the directory. I personally wouldn’t have approved many of them.

And sorry, but if its the mitigation factor, then you are saying my app is spammy which its not – its overall rating is 4 out of 5, it sends one notification to the feed when the user hits a certain page in the workflow (once), and doesn’t get reported as spammy by the users when they send out invites, or blocked on notifications etc. Yet my invites allocation was more than halved initally (with invites being directly related to user growth rate).

As for “righteous indignation and sense of entitlement come from”, well I’m actually not all that, but its my (and the other developer) time and effort that was put into develping the third-party apps, and you need to remember that out of the 19,500 apps only about 30 have been developed by Facebook themselves. Facebook made a song and dance about spammyness, implemented a poor (IMHO) method of control and then we find an app with 100 invites – why wouldn’t we be annoyed given that we’ve had our own allocations cut to well below this number?

Communication by Facebook with the developer community is poor to say the least. I am an IT professional with more than 14yrs commercial experience and with Facebbok I am astounded by some of the things they’ve done without any form of consultation with us.

The attitude, that third-party developers should be honored to have access to the facebook platform will be its undoing in the longer term. Facebook are no longer the only game in town, and whilst there is some first mover traction, don’t expect a huge amount of loyalty.

As senatuskienlee points out above your post Facebook really does need some ‘gray hairs’ on the team.

v14gr4 emails get dumped straight into my spam folder by my email provider. I’m no more upset about that than I am about facebook limiting the invites available to spam-like applications.

Facebook is building up a lot of ill-will amongst the development community. They need to put someone in charge and focus their efforts on empowering their users to control their user experience.

As for me, the minute I get a real alternative to facebook, you can bet that I’m going to be jumping ship.

My worry is if Facebook doesn’t want to buy your app, but make it themselves. Change the name and remake it to call it theirs and out do yours with (and other tricks they might have) invites… that could be unfair.

I hope Facebook doesn’t do anything unfair or unethical… but I really don’t think they will because there is always other networks we can use.

I see nothing wrong with what they are doing here. Of course they are playing favorites because it’s in their interests to increase revenue.

“if facebook really cared about their users and the spammyness that facebook claim they are trying to elivate, how can they justify giving an allocation of 100 to this application.”

It’s very simple. They have a business relationship with this company. They have a hands-on approach with the details of the app, or at least whatever assurances the company gives them. They can monitor this app directly. Obviously they don’t have the resources to police 20,000 apps in this same way, the vast majority of which are half-baked gold-rush apps with very little purpose. And honestly, the number of requests per day is not the root of spamminess… it’s just a mitigation factor for apps that are already spammy.

It’s understandable to be angry as a developer, but don’t blow it out of proportion. It’s ridiculous to assume that now that F8 is out there, Facebook is never going to do anything outside the scope of the official API ever again. I’m not sure where this righteous indignation and sense of entitlement come from, and I’m really curious about why Arrington is spinning this thing so sensationally.

The reality is, you still get a lot for free with F8. If you built your business model on top of any free API then you probably shouldn’t sleep well at night, but if the API is F8 then the sky isn’t falling… yet.

You need some real grey haired folks in that organization, folks who’ve had some experience making sure some things are not done like in the wild west.

Strike! Strike!