As we know, Facebook Platform is dealing with some serious spam/abuse problems. This is compromising the Facebook experience – even Facebook’s generally rock-solid technical infrastructure is paying the price (yesterday FB logged me in and out about 30 times, in addition to being offline). To address a part of this issue, FB is changing its ranking algorithm for its application directory to reward engagement. This is a good step, and I hope they also follow this logic down to the newsfeed; I don’t care about every application my friends try out, but rather what applications they enjoy and actually use.
This somewhat tangentially relates to an interesting post from Greg Bloom over at TechPresident. Greg challenges some of the metrics of SNS and widgetized engagement in the political sphere, and he brings up some great points – here’s a snippet.
There is an opportunity here. For months now I’ve been getting on the losing side of arguments about the utility of the Change.org and Facebook Causes app – I’d pan them because they have adopted a narrow fundraising paradigm that doesn’t seem to me to fit right, but I’d lose these arguments because I never was able to verbalize what exactly these political activism applications should encourage. I don’t think I’m going to lose that argument any more! It sucks to be reminded that you’ve raised zero dollars to stop global warming—and may I say that it must somehow suck even more to be reminded that you’ve raised a cool ten dollars to stop global warming—but if I could show my friends how many politicians I’ve told to do something about global warming… well, I just might shoot my mouth off at politicians all day.
So much of what’s exciting about this aspect of social networking is still in the realm of the hypothetical. The robustness of these interactions will depend upon some pretty fine technical points (like, when I post on a Senator’s wall, how widely will that message be distributed through my friends’ feeds? What if the message gets deleted from the politician’s page – is there a way so that my network still sees that I posted it in the first place?) Presumably, staffers will keep their bosses’ profile pages sparkly clean; presumably, once they realize how disruptive these walls could be, many politicians would take them down entirely (although many others would learn to embrace it). On the other hand, future “political action” apps will surely augment the process and make the Facebook interactions between constituents and their elected representatives even more dynamic.
I hope to respond to Greg’s post on TechPresident – you can read the full post here.
Tags: activation, engagement, facebook, politics
I think they got their terms of the measurement attributes confused, as they’re really measuring Interaction, not engagement.
details here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/08/31/facebook-to-rank-applications-by-interaction-not-engagement/