Today, new improvements have been pushed by Facebook for applications. The About pages are now promoted to the functionality of Facebook Pages and developers get improved statistics with graphs.
About Page
Since the About Pages now work like Facebook Pages, the About Page has gain new features:
- The Review section has been converted to The Wall
- A new Review section now uses the Reviews widget so that users can write reviews giving 1 to 5 stars to the application with a textual review. As the Wall was previously used by users for everything and anything except reviews, Facebook has answered developers complaints with a separate review space.
- It is now easier to promote an application through advertising
- Users can now become fans and developers can send updates to their fans
- The developer’s view is different: developers cannot write reviews and they have additional buttons to edit the application, view statistics, send updates to fans and other management facilities
- Since it is now a Facebook Page, developers can add applications to their About page
To see an example of the new About page, I invite you to visit my application’s about page: Status Competition.
Improved Statistics
The new statistics page, now called Insights displays nice-looking graphs:
For the graph, you can select different statistics:
- Canvas Page Views
- Unique Canvas Page Views
- Average HTTP Request Time on Canvas Pages
- Average FBML Render Time on Canvas Pages
- Unique Adds
- Unique Removes
- Unique Blocks
- Unique Unblocks
- API Calls
- Unique API Calls
As previously, the statistics are still compiled daily from midnight to midnight Pacific time so you cannot see statistics for the current day.
On another tab, you still get a sample of HTTP Request Statistics and on yet another tab you get the previous Add/Remove Referrer Statistics.
What’s unclear for me, since my first public application, Status Competition, was only published 20 days or so weeks ago is that I only can see the last 2 weeks of statistics. I hope statistics are not limited to only the previous 2 weeks. One thing I think is missing is the ability to export the statistics for spreadsheet mashing.
For more information on the changes to the About Page and the statistics reports, you can read “Changes to the Application About Page“.