Facebook is no longer providing daily, weekly and monthly traffic measured to within 100,000 users for apps on its platform, instead turning to less granular data and reporting periodic app rankings. The decision comes conspicuously on the heels of a firestorm over Instagram. The Facebook owned photo sharing site was said to have lost millions of users over the holidays, based on data publicized by Inside Network’s AppData.
Now the data stream that services such as AppData rely on is no longer available. In its place, Facebook will list apps by popularity in the AppCenter and provide a loose metric by which to estimate user counts based on where apps sit in the rankings.
AppData’s stream goes kaput
Facebook’s reasoning is that being completely transparent about the ever-fluid number of users for apps has been problematic for developers. Snafus rooted in data reporting have in the past showed user counts as plummeting, even down to zero in some cases. It may have even hindered innovation, according to the social net. Facebook says having their user base constantly reported to the public could be instilling fear in app makers, making them reluctant to introduce changes to their apps for fear of fluctuations in users.
Source: TechCrunch
