death of the notifications

[mataal]

hi all,

i'm sure you would have seen this blog post about the death of
facebook notifications- http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=365.
any thoughts?

in the application that i have we used to send invitation related
notifications (user2user and yes that's not the best approach) and
since that's dead we're planning to explore the new invite channel
(http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Roadmap_Invites) .
however i'm curious if any of you have already used this and i can see
the behaviour on the new UIs.

regards,
ashish

[Ramprasad Rajendran]

Hi,

My opinion is that notifications were exploited and was a major source of spam and it is good, that they will be retired.

This page contains the best practices of what communication would be the best for getting new/retaining new users.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Communication_Channels_Best_Practices

I did see an interesting usage in one of Zynga's apps where they were using feeds to send invites/u2u notifications. Though I'm sure they were just testing things out and isn't live across all users.

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ram
HashCube

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[mat...@gmail.com]

hi ram,

agreed, notifications were quite spammy.

it was the best practices document that i read and which recommends invites for the scenario i am looking at. only problem was everything seems too much in the air. as a case in point see this "We're also still finalizing exactly how invites will be implemented going forward (whether we'll continue to use fb:request-form or build a new tag). Please check back to this page for details." from the wiki.

feeds sounds interesting for sure, but would doubt the efficacy there, given the fact that feed/stream entries are not garunteed to even show up on the user's stream (don't know how many people ever see the live stream). can you share more as to what you saw?

~ashish

[Ramprasad Rajendran]

Hi,

The feeds that I saw where directly posted on the friend's wall, so it was directed to the user. It has the same effect as a person going to his friend's wall and typing a message for him. The notification(or email) will go to the friend and all the mutual friends would see the message.

Yes, the roadmap is a little vague. I guess facebook is still finalising how things should be and hope we'll get more clarity and details soon.

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ram
HashCube

[mat...@gmail.com]

hey,

ah ok...so that's writing on the friend's wall rather than one's own feed... interesting as this will cause an extra email notification which the new invite policy might not!

still finalizing is great, but you don't normally remove a feature without finalizing the replacement(s)!

regards,
ashish

[Ramprasad Rajendran]

Hi,

I meant they are finalizing on how the new invites will work. Notifications have been replaced by counters and news within the dashboard which I guess is final. 

I think the idea was to disable notifications and make counters and the news on the dashboard live. Since it isn't live maybe notifications have not really been retired yet. I'm just speculating here though.

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ram
HashCube