It is public knowledge that Facebook received several lawsuits due to scams performed through their game ads. In addition, some users, non-gamers in particular, have become quite irritated by “push notifications” that appear in the notification channel saying who has fertilized someone’s farm or who has chased away the crows.
To address these issues, game platform manager, Gareth Davis, stated that Facebook is working on the Game Dashboard. The Game Dashboard hopes to make it easier for the users to go to recently played games and look for new games. It also has Game News which will let the players know his or her ranking in games being played, as well as what his or her friends are playing.
Moreover, this Facebook feature will provide game notification differently. Instead of push notifications, it can send game announcements via email. This particular feature benefits the non-gaming members of social networking site because they will no longer see the said announcements in the notification channel.
Facebook Game Dashboard intends to satisfy the needs of non-gamers, gamers, and the game developers. The results are still uncertain whether the Game Dashboard would boost the website’s traffic or the other way around. For the meantime, it is a wait–and–see situation. Hopefully, in its launch on January 2010, it will yield positive results.
