Monitoring App Quality with Insights

By Dave Miller - Yesterday at 12:00pm

We’re introducing two new features in Insights: App Ratings and Negative Feedback. They both help you monitor positive and negative user signals.

As announced last week, inclusion and success in the App Center based on how people rate your app and how they engage with it. App Ratings and Negative Feedback can inform not only how you design your app experience to increase engagement and satisfaction, but also how your app grows through the App Center.

App Ratings

As people interact with apps, they can rate them using a five-star scale. These ratings show up in App Center and on your app detail page.

The app ratings dashboard shows you how people rate your app in aggregate across certain demographics. The overview at the top of the page presents your average app rating and your rating by star. You can view metrics for a day, week, month or custom date range.

Below the overview, a series of bar charts show your ratings across several demographics broken down by age and gender, country, and locale (which takes language into consideration). You can view each chart in absolute numbers or relative percentages.

Negative Feedback

Along with presenting positive ratings from users, the new features also help you monitor the negative signals for both stream publish and Open Graph stories. They show you how many times people have hidden stories from your app, reported stories as spam or blocked the app itself.

These reports take into the account the same type of automated systems we use internally to catch spam and malicious behavior on Platform. You will now be able to see the absolute number of negative signals or the ratio of negative feedback to the total number of impressions. The spam impression overview chart displays your reports against a green background when you’re doing well, and a yellow one if reports reach a level of concern. You can view metrics for a day, week, month or custom date range.

You can view reports for all story types or analyze content published using stream publish or Open Graph on breakout dashboards. These dashboards show more detail about each type of feedback. When analyzing stream publish feedback, you can see how users and non-users engaged with the content.

When analyzing Open Graph content, you can filter the chart to show user feedback on a specific action type, object type or all content.

In addition to these new tools, we encourage you to proactively review stories from your app to make sure they are engaging and include relevant content.

We want to continue to foster a healthy ecosystem where people have positive experiences on Facebook, and developers build, grow and maintain high-quality apps.

To start reviewing app ratings and negative feedback, access Insights for your app here or the Dev App. To learn more about Insights, please see the documentation.

Preview sponsored stories with the Action Spec Preview Tool

By Gokhan Caglar - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 3:00pm

Today we're launching the action spec preview tool to make it easier for you to preview sponsored stories. Sponsored stories are stories that are prominently displayed to fans and their friends on the right-hand-side of any page or in news feed. Sponsored stories are a great way to increase the visibility of news feed stories that relate to your business and to drive engagement. The preview tool will now allow you to use the action spec to see how stories from your page or app will appear when sponsored. The action spec allows you to create sponsored stories, target audiences and measure actions using Graph actions. The action spec preview tool provides a simple way to visualize any story defined by an action spec as a sponsored story.

Two methods to preview sponsored stories with action spec preview tool

Using the drop down menu: Use the drop down menu to preview recent stories from your news feed or Page(s) you manage or like. The preview tool will display how sponsored stories will be seen by users in the news feed and right hand side of any page on Facebook. For Open Graph actions, the tool will also display the various selectors (action type and properties of the object) associated with the action spec to enable you to experiment with different combinations and specify the exact action spec you are interested in using.

Using the action spec: A more powerful method is to enter a specific action spec for any story on the Graph that you would like to preview. In addition to displaying how sponsored stories will be presented and the various selectors associated with the action spec, the tool will also provide the approximate number of actions, actors and actor’s friends within the last week that match the spec.

Discovering and visualizing stories from your timeline

A great way to familiarize yourself with the action spec preview tool is by previewing all recent stories from your timeline. For example, let’s say that you recently listened to Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson on Rdio, and a story was generated on your timeline. Once you select your timeline in the dropdown menu of the preview tool, the tool will display that story as a sponsored story in the right hand side or in the news feed.

Right Hand Side Version

News Feed Version

Experimenting with selectors

The action spec preview tool displays the various selectors (action type and properties of the object) associated with the action spec, which enables you to create different types of stories. Continuing with the example from above, the preview tool displays the various selectors associated with the story about you listening to the song Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson on Rdio, such as album, song.musician or application. To view stories about users listening to songs by Michael Jackson, click on the song.musician link and, the Tool will display the action spec and a sample of real stories that match the spec.

{"action.type":"music.listens","song.musician":"http://www.rdio.com/artist/Michael_Jackson/"}

In addition to the action spec preview tool, we also launched the ad preview API for previewing ads for existing ad groups, ad creatives and creative specifications. You can read more about the ad preview API at viewing ad previews.

In summary, the action spec preview tool helps you discover and visualize stories to sponsor, size the opportunity for a story, and discover alternate action specs all within a simple, visual interface. This visual workflow should help any developer or advertiser understand how to take advantage of available sponsored stories inventory. To start creating your own sponsored stories, go to: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/adscreator/. Or if you are a API developer, go to: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/creative-specs/#action_specs_Sponsored_stories

Gokhan is a software engineer at Facebook working on Ads API. He will be sponsoring likes of this blog post with the Action Spec:

{action.type: 'like', object: 'https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/05/10/preview-sponsored-stories-with-the-action-spec-preview-tool/'}

Developer Spotlight: Endomondo

By Bryant Lee - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 10:00am

Endomondo is a mobile and web app where people can track and share their workouts – including running, biking, cycling and hiking - with friends.

What Endomondo Does Well

Endomondo uses single sign-on for Android and iOS to streamline the registration process, so that a user does not need to create a new username and password. Endomondo uses location (GeoPoints on the workout object) to display workout routes, which appear as rich maps on a user's timeline. The app also calculates and shows workout metrics – including total distance, average speed and calories burnt – to create more interesting stories.
Endomondo associates a sport object – such as running, biking, cycling and hiking – with each workout, allowing them to determine a user's last workout and top sports.
Endomondo provides a simple control to manage sharing to Facebook.
Endomondo complements its mobile app with a desktop web app where users can analyze their own workout statistics. Through the Endomondo activity feed, users can find friends who recently joined and follow their workouts, which starts conversations and encourages sharing.

Implementation Profile

Actions - Objects Track – Workout: "Bryant Lee tracked a workout"
Aggregations Last Workout Top Sports

Result
Since launching with Open Graph in March, Endomondo has seen traffic from Facebook increase by more than 75% and the number of workouts shared daily on Facebook grow by over 150%.

Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

By Zhen Fang - Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 5:45pm

Since last Wednesday's update, we announced the App Center, published Action Links for Timeline Apps, a Developer Spotlight on Kobo, and a How-to: Improve the Experience for Returning Users.

Breaking Changes Effective on June 6, 2012

As announced on the Roadmap and Developer Blog, on June 6, 2012, the following changes will be in effect:

Removal of FBML
FBML apps will no longer work on Platform. All FBML endpoints will be removed. If your app is still utilizing FBML, please migrate before June 6 to avoid any issues.

XMPP Connections must be done over TLS
Apps connecting to Facebook's XMPP service will be required to use STARTTLS for all connections. We will start rejecting unencrypted connections.

Bugs activity between Tuesday, May 1 and Tuesday, May 8

177 bugs were reported
33 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
17 bugs were by design
48 bugs were fixed
51 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed between Tuesday, May 1 and Tuesday, May 8

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com between Tuesday, May 1 and Tuesday, May 8

481 questions asked
430 questions with a score of 0 or greater
138 answered, 32% answered rate
233 replied, 54% reply rate