Facebook is meeting with top app developers on its platform to discuss a series of planned changes that could drastically alter the virality of social games, according to Venture Beat. If the report is correct, Facebook plans to alter the way notifications and requests sent by apps (including social games) display on user news feeds and profile pages. The changes would move these notifications to less visible parts of a user's Facebook page.
Specific changes being proposed by Facebook would allegedly move the Notifications tab to a less visible part of the site and segregate requests sent by apps into a new sub-section of a user's inbox. Facebook may also be looking into ways for users to give their email addresses to trusted developers, which would let apps communicate directly with them. A "Games" tab may be added to the left-hand side of the user page that would aggregate all activity related to social games.
The goal of the proposed changes is to give individual Facebook users more control over what information displays on their personal pages. Currently, social games are usually configured to post notifications to a user's Facebook stream whenever that user gains a level or achieves some other interesting goal. These notifications are visible to all of that person's Facebook friends. Virtually all of the proposed changes would reduce visibility of these notifications significantly.
This potential change poses a big problem for social publishers like Zynga and Playfish, who are believed to acquire most of their new users through curious clicks on game updates posted in Facebook user streams. The Facebook changes could make social publishers more reliant on advertising as a source of game growth, which would be good for Facebook's bottom line while giving larger companies like Zynga a tremendous edge over smaller competitors.
Source: http://www.virtualworldsnews.com
