Facebook has just introduced some new default statistics for applications. Previously they would just show the total number of users that had installed the application, now they’re trying to measure how many people are actually using the app every day. This is an interesting change, since as they say you start off trying to measure what you value, and end up valuing what you measure. For Facebook apps, measuring the total number of users favored those that were shallow, but spread widely, whereas this new measure is designed to capture how much users actually engage with an app.
The measure is shown as a percentage of your users who actually take an action that interacts with your app every day. There are various actions captured, but they all involve the user actually doing something with your app.
The first day’s figures were very kind to Funhouse Photo, showing 86% of the users as active the previous day. I’d expect this to drop a bit as some of the novelty wears off, but I’m planning on regularly adding new effects in the hope this will keep people playing around with it, and sending photos to their friends. I’m also thinking about showing every photo change in your feed; I was worried that was a bit spammy, but I’d like to experiment to see if it is actually useful.
Funhouse Photo User Count: 200. Disappointing to be honest. It’s still climbing, but with a fairly shallow slope. I shall see be able to see if new effects and some more visible notifications give it a boost.