Widgets Abound

With the recent success of the Facebook platform and the surge of ‘third party developers’ into the market, the world of widgets is opening up. Everyone is excited about it, even Google apparently. This bodes well for J-Squared as we expand our products to other places on the web. We see widgets as the next development of interactive rich content and advertising online. As people learn where they ‘like to be’ online, bringing rich content to them will be paramount, both for advertisers and content providers.

Facebook’s New Metrics – Activity

Facebook has changed their rating system to rank applications based on their active users. However, many people don’t know what ‘active’ means according to Facebook. Here is an excerpt from their developer blog:

“With a change this foundational to Facebook Platform’s measurement, we want to make sure that you completely understand how we will be measuring engagement. We define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day).”

These touch points are:
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash

“The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together. We display this as the number of “Daily Active Users.” Next to it we also show what percentage that is of the application’s total number of users.”

This is a good measure of engagement, but we don’t think it’s the best indicator of overall utility. If lots of people are clicking to play flash in their profile, that’s a quick way of engaging the user, but canvas pages seem more important to us. That’s where users can really interact with the software. It’s also where companies can drive revenue.

This early in the game, stats and rankings should all be taken with a grain of salt.