Top Facebook Applications See 25 Percent Drop In Traffic Since Redesign
If you thought the last redesign spelled the death of the Facebook platform, you ain't seen nothing yet! Last July Facebook released their new design and within a matter of months, widget applications had become a thing of the past.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of a story All Facebook has been tracking since last year, when it declared widgets on the platform effectively dead after the July 2008 redesign. The new numbers quantify what that piece only argued: the redesign did not just annoy users — it stripped the discovery surfaces that widget-style applications depended on.
The drop also lands amid a rough stretch for Facebook's developer relations. A March TechCrunch poll found 94% of users disliking the redesign, and this follows a familiar pattern — GigaOM flagged a similar traffic collapse scare back in October 2007 — making this less a one-off than the third time platform changes have visibly reset application traffic.
First-order effects
- Top application developers lose roughly a quarter of their traffic overnight through no change of their own, since distribution now flows through Facebook's redesigned home page and profile rather than app directories and profile boxes.
Second-order effects
- Developers are pushed away from passive widget installs toward engagement-driven utilities and feeds, concentrating attention and ad dollars among apps that fit the new layout while marginalizing the rest.
Third-order effects
- If each interface overhaul keeps resetting third-party reach at this scale, the Facebook platform settles into a structure where the host's design decisions, not the apps themselves, determine which developers survive — recurring platform risk as a permanent cost of building there.
The trend: Facebook's repeated redesigns are turning third-party developer fortunes into a function of host-side interface control, with each platform change re-ranking who gets distribution.