FeedRankingFAQ
From Facebook Developers Wiki
We at Facebook were asked some questions about how we determine whether to publish a feed story to a user's friends' News Feeds. In particular, on 12/18/07 we announced that we are now taking into account the quality of the content on the linked page. Here's some more info about this:
What is the goal of this? Why is it a bad thing to ask people to install an application first so they can have the full rich experience? Isn’t that how Facebook works?
In general, we've found the experience of having to go through an interstitial page (such as a login or add application page) in order to access the content from the application to be one of the more frustrating parts about the way Platform works. Users cannot possibly be expected to make an informed decision about whether or not to grant various privileges to an application when they haven't even seen anything about the application yet.
This is similar to the idea of how pages are ranked by search engines: if a page requires that a user create an account before even seeing the information they're searching for, usually the user will just get frustrated and move on to the next search result, and so most search engines instead select pages that do not have this barrier.
Facebook Video in fact used to require that users add the Video application before viewing any videos. This requirement has been removed recently, though. The Politics application does not have this requirement. To our knowledge, no other Facebook app has ever had this requirement, although admittedly it's hard to compare since most other apps are pre-installed with the creation of a new account.
What constitutes "good content easily accessible"? If we let a user take a quiz, but then require installing the app to see the results, is that better? If you can see your results but not your friends' results – is that better?
Usually, a News Feed story is about a particular piece of content. For example, it might be a story about a blog post or a photo or video being uploaded or a user taking a quiz. We'd encourage you to show the full content in a link from the story. So in these cases we'd encourage you to show the full blog post, the full size photo or video, or the results the user got when taking the quiz. You should include whatever information you need to show this content directly in the link from the Feed story (e.g., the ID corresponding to that piece of content). If there are privacy restrictions on who can see the content, you can use the fb:if-can-see tag to hide content from users who should not be able to see it.
If Facebook discourages requiring installing an app, is requiring LOGIN considered better? Is that the “recommended” way to provide a rich personal and social experience right off the bat without requiring installs?
For now, requiring only a login is treated as better than requiring an install. This might be a good middle-ground solution if you absolutely need information about the viewing user in order to display the content. But we'd strongly recommend that if possible, you use neither.
How does Facebook intend to monitor this? Is the real question not whether we require an install, but how long we engage the user on average before they return? Are you planning to actually pre-spider all our News Feed links, or just watch user behavior?
While we may in the future pre-crawl links from News Feed stories, for now we will enforce this by doing some analysis on the user's click-stream after clicking on a link from the story.
When do you expect this change to begin?
It went into effect on Monday, January 14.
How fast does the algorithm "learn"? If we change newsfeed items to not require install, is it reasonable to expect to measure the results within a day or two or will it take a longer period for the algorithm to "learn" to show them more often?
There's a bit of a lag in there - could potentially take as long as a week for it to fully adjust, though we're looking at reducing this delay for some apps so it might soon be more like 3 days.
Is it okay to require install after the first click? Can we show them some content and then if they want to see more, force an install?
Our monitoring is based on the time a user spends before getting to the add page. If you show some reasonable amount of content before directing the user to the add page, this should be fine. If you just show a page that says "click here to continue" which leads to the add page, then you'll likely still be penalized.
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