今年facebook内部的传播渠道发生了巨大的变化，就facebook首席技术官Bret Taylor（原产品总监）的角度而言，他们更加希望能够去影响到所有的开发者，特别是社交游戏开发者。

第一个被屏除的是自动化的垃圾信息推介（告知功能），这个功能的取消对于社交游戏开发者的影响无疑是巨大的，从各个游戏最近数月的增长乏力就可见一斑。Bret Taylor在谈到这个问题的时候表示，从游戏中发出的任何无价值的信息都不会被facebook成功传达，目前他们已经组织了专门的队伍来应对垃圾信息告知这块。

brett-taylor

这样的话留给开发者思考的应该是怎么来应对这样的改变以便获得更有效的传播方式。

尽管垃圾信息的推介的取消对于社交游戏开发者具有相当的负面影响，但是Bret Taylor却认为游戏才是他们平台上的杀手级应用。虽然他们之前也觉得游戏对于网站的重要性，但是直到现在他们才开始很认真地组织做这件事。社交游戏是facebook玩家相当主要的核心经验。

More big changes are coming to Facebook’s communication channels this year, as Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor told us in an interview recently. They’re worth a closer look, as they’re likely to impact all developers, and especially social game developers.

The first is an automated spam filter for all Facebook communication channels. Granted, the spam problem has lessened as Facebook has removed some entirely, like notifications, or scaled back others, like news feed stories and requests. Here’s the relevant excerpt, from Taylor:

So rather than saying you’re not allowed to do X, Y, and Z with a dialog box in your game, if you’re sending useless messages from your game, we just won’t deliver them, and we’ll give you that feedback. And then you can change the way you send messages to send higher signal-to-noise content. This is something that we just haven’t invested enough in, but we now have a very large team working on spam and quality. That will touch all of our communication channels, and news feed. This is going to be a year-long project though, because we’re not going to remove the policies until we know that the system that replaces it is high quality.

Expect Facebook to start sharing more about its plans here in the coming months. If it wasn’t obvious already, given Facebook’s changes to date, developers should think about how to provide useful communication in their apps.

But it’s not just more automated punishment ahead. Taylor also said that the company is giving social gaming a new focus, describing games as a “killer app” on the platform. From the interview:

The other initiative is we have a team exclusively focused on games now. Internally, we’ve always known this, but now we’re formally recognizing it, that just like photos, just like events, games are a killer app on Facebook, and a primary part of the user experience on Facebook. We have product managers and engineers who are extremely talented now working on it.

Right now we have a Games dashboard that I would say is pretty uninspired. It works, but it’s not something that I think is revolutionary. We have a team now who is responsible for making games successful on Facebook as a category, and when we make changes to our overall product, we’re going to track the effects on that category just like we track the effects on photos and events on Facebook.

In other words, when Facebook makes larger changes — say, updates to the home page this fall — it will closely examine how that impacts social game developers. The company has no doubt done this in the past. Taylor’s point is more that it will now be very careful about how other changes might accidentally harm games. His conclusion on these changes:

Over the next 3-6 months those effects will be noticeable, I think they’ll have the effect that we won’t inadvertently affect the ecosystem by our own product changes. Then, we can slowly make our policies higher level and more “spirit of the law” instead of letter of the law because we’ll have these automated systems to enforce them in a more natural way.