Facebook changes how it measures application activity

A sharp-eyed tipster told Nick O'Neill at All Facebook that the social network has modified the metrics it uses to track user activity on developer applications.

Instead of reporting how many daily active users an application has, Facebook now reports its monthly active users. The reason, company representatives said, is that while there's no universal metric that applies to all applications, monthly generally works better than daily: education applications might peak during the week, movie-related apps could have higher traffic on weekends, and some games might see their peak during boring afternoons at the office. Plenty of "useful" apps on the platform just don't get used every day.

Facebook spokesman David Swain said an official blog post about the switch would be available later on Tuesday.

This is a fairly big deal for developers--though O'Neill speculates they may be able to get daily stats internally--and pretty much insignificant for users, unless they were totally picky about knowing exactly how many people were using their favorite apps every day. One developer who spoke to CNET News said monthly stats will probably be a plus for him, if only because it means his application will have a 22,000 next to it rather than a 1,500.

It does deal a blow to Adonomics, a start-up that tracks daily use of Facebook applications. That company's business model is now uncertain.

This post was updated at 11:48 a.m. PT with comment from Facebook.

[Lee_Lorenzen]

Caroline,

WRT Adonomics, our business model is tied to providing the best possible analytics and web services available to Facebook and other social network developers. Any changes that Facebook makes, so long as they are applied to all companies equally, will not effect our business model.

WRT the specifics of reporting monthly vs. daily active users, Adonomics will adjust and adapt. This is similar to when Facebook stopped reporting total installs but still showed Daily Active Users as a % of total installs. This allowed us to compute the total installs via a simple formula (although not to the hourly granularity that was true in the first few months that the platform launched).

WRT Adonomics, our site provides a wealth of services to developers and advertisers who want to track their own and their competitors apps. The Adonomics 100, the Adonomics Leaderboard, the individual app profile pages, the marketplace, the GEM System, the Ad Management service and the App brokerage service all provide ongoing value. In addition, app developers that want to ensure their app stats are fully insulated from facebook changes can send them directly to us (as 5,000 apps do today).

Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Adonomics
[e-mail]