Playing games on Facebook is fun, but the newsfeed it generates is annoying. So in an effort to increase gaming experience and keeping in mind the users who have nothing to do with games on Facebook, Facebook annouced Tuesday night that it will change the way notifications regarding to games are published, making them less intrusive.
“People who use Facebook either tend to tell us that they love playing games or hate them, and we haven’t had the right tools to enable developers to grow their games while at the same time providing a great user experience for non-gamers. We’re building more sophisticated tools that will allow us all to be more successful against those goals,” wrote Jared Morgenstern on Facebook blog.
(Source: Facebook)
The most notable change is, users will not be intruded with newsfeeds of games/applications they don’t use. For example, if you don’t play FarmVille, you will not receive any notifications regarding the game or feeds about who found a blah blah blah, but Facebook may add notifications about your friends and the game they play or have joined, leaving it up to you to join the game. Morgenstern explains “By showing fewer but more impactful News Feed stories based on friends’ activity and social context, we hope to drive new user growth for games.”
Other changes includes displaying full game stories since they are shown uniquely to those play. Game bookmarks will be added and reordered automatically according to usage. Invitations and gifts will be highlighted next to the bookmark.
I feel this is one of the best changes in regard to game feedbacks. Let us know your views on this latest change. Facebook also said it updated its developers policy to make them more flexible instead of putting into force rigid rules. Morgenstern explains about it by an example, “we no longer prevent you from encouraging users to interact with their friends through Facebook’s communication channels when they come back to a game. Instead, we’ve focused our policies to only restrict spammy applications who want new users to invite friends before they’ve even tried the application.”
Real-time search engine, Wowd, has launched a new tool called the Social Discovery client for Facebook.
Social Discovery Client works as a filtering application or your account manager. It can filter updates from friends, create custom feds, and block game spam.
If you are an avid game player or have a lot of friends who plays games on Facebook, then game feeds will be your no. 1 headache. Wowd’s app can help you organize things for you, if you don’t like messing around with your privacy settings. If you already got your privacy settings in place then this feature can overlooked.
The best thing about the app is, it lets users create filters by topic or keyword. The output is a feed of related content, say, the latest Episode of Grey’s Anatomy or the English Premeire League. What’s more? You can save and organize the feeds. Cool huh!
The tool is also a great way to see the feed generated from a particular friend. A great tool to help you such that you doesn’t miss important post from your close friends, in the mist of pages and pages of feeds.
Apart from above features, Wowd client also helps user to discover the best of the web, including real-time search with live streaming.
The tool is free to download, and works on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.
Gist is a free web application that lets users manage their personal and professional contacts in Microsoft Outlook, Gmail and Salesforce.com. Now, the latest release of Gist will let users access their Facebook activity stream.
Gist aggregates the network information in users’ e-mail inboxes, analyzes the contacts, then ranks and prioritizes the importance of contacts based on the frequency and timing of messaging interaction with the Gist user.
The latest Gist release leverage Facebook connect, enabling its users to access fresh Facebook content, including status updates, contact data, and other News Feed content through the Gist web application, Gist iPhone app and Gist Outlook plug-in.
Gist also integrated with the Facebook inbox, allowing Gist users to access their Facebook messages in the correspondence widgets on their Gist profile pages. Moreover, through the powerful and updated “Gist Importance algorithm”, users will be able to filter Facebook data stream and to only see post from the most importance contacts.
Gist have also done some cosmetic changes. Latest Gist release includes Facebook inbox and activity stream integration, list tagging, and a new dashboard layout. More on it can be found on the Gist blog.
