Facebook Stopping Application Notifications March 1st
Recently Facebook posted on their blog that will no long send notifications from Facebook apps to users. My response? ”FINALLY! Thank you very much Facebook!”. I’m sure you are all in agreement with me on this one. I am constantly bombarded by Facebook app notifications on Facebook – it is quite the annoyance. Facebook plans to stop app notifications March 1st 2010 at 10AM PST (that’s tomorrow).
When Facebook launched the application platform in 2007 there were just 40 million users on Facebook. Since then, in less than three years, more than 350 million users have joined Facebook, and more than one million developers have created more than 500,000 applications. That is a lot of apps and a lot of growth. It is also a lot of notification spam. Now I don’t know if it is just me but since this announcement I have been hammered with even more notifications now than ever before. I even got one from iLike which usually doesn’t notify me unless there is an upcoming concert from a band I like.
Facebook goes on to provide more information on the best practices to communicate with your users in place of notifications.
- Use counters to notify users that they should take action within your application or integration.
- Set news within the dashboards to share lightweight messages.
- Ask for the extended permission to email users and send richer, more engaging messages.
What do you think? Are you happy applications will no longer be able to notify you on Facebook? Let us know.