

18 of the top 25 Facebook games lost significant monthly active users - startuprules
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2010/05/03/top-25-facebook-games-for-may-2010/

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potatolicious
Excuse me while I weep for spammy games that litter my feed with massive
amounts of pointless trivia, and pester me at every corner to invite my
friends.

If your traffic drops because an avenue of spam has been closed, perhaps you
need to take a good long look in the mirror.

Which isn't to say that third party notifications weren't useful for
legitimate purposes - they wouldn't have even existed otherwise - but it was a
massively abused system and I'm glad the hole's been closed.

~~~
ryanwanger
I guess you weren't the only one who didn't understand that you could disable
all notifications from a particular app in two clicks.

Not sure why they couldn't separate spam in your feed from direct
notifications...the later were 95% relevant for me once I hid everything from
Mafia Wars and people sending me stupid presents.

~~~
derefr
> I guess you weren't the only one who didn't understand that you could
> disable all notifications from a particular app in two clicks.

At one point my friends were discovering new apps to spam notifications from
faster than they could possibly be playing them. Blocking an app is no help
when you have requests from a hundred different ones.

~~~
tokenadult
_Blocking an app is no help when you have requests from a hundred different
ones._

F.B. Purity

<http://www.fbpurity.com/>

works well for that. Constantly posting articles about the security risks and
general stupidity of Facebook games also helps to make it uncool (at least
among my circle of Facebook friends) to play Facebook games. If the spam keeps
up even after that, the friends are removed from my feed, or, in the really
bad cases, unfriended.

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kenj0418
I only ever know about the first time one of my friends joins one. After that
all is silence as I hide the spambots.

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cynicalkane
Tangential: I wonder how well a game like Nethack would work as a Facebook
game. The game could Facebook broadcast if a player ascends, dies after
passing a certain (hard to reach) milestone, gets a high score or achieves an
account-first...

I guess it probably would only appeal to whatever few people are into social
media and are willing to play ASCII games. But it would be nice to see a real
game--not to mention an important, venerable one--show up in my newsfeed all
the time, instead of Farmville, Mafia Wars, that chef game with those
obnoxious over-cute chibis... (Yeah, I know you can block them, I'm just
lazy...)

~~~
lanstein
or Legend of the Red Dragon :)

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pg
Most sites lose traffic in summer.

~~~
TotlolRon
The month of March is 64% winter and 36% Spring. April is 100% spring.

~~~
pg
Sure. The dropoff is gradual as weather gets better. It's not a step function.

Maybe I should just resign myself to saying everything in twice as many
words...

~~~
projectileboy
# words required + patience required = C * # of HN users, where C > 1...
<sigh>...

~~~
TotlolRon
Yah, those newbies. They don't get it and can't read pseudo code.

(the yearly summer trend is still far away regardless of how sunny it is in
the bay area right now. If there is anything special this year is the
relatively early arrival of Easter which may break patterns.)

ah, much better with more words.

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CoachRufus87
this is why you shouldn't base your business model on another companies
platform. should they make a design change (or even decide to clone your
functionality), your business could be significantly impacted.

i'm sure facebook also sees the millions in revenue that 3rd party games are
making on their site and are probably developing a soon to be released
"Facebook Games"...

it's business.

~~~
jakarta
It seems like most of these social gaming companies are taking steps towards
having games be less reliant on Facebook as a platform. Zynga is developing
their own games site and HeyZap seems to be creating a pipeline of sorts b/w
publishers and games.

~~~
CoachRufus87
yet facebook seems to be the center of the social internet. people don't leave
facebook (i'm talking about your average fb user). the value proposition would
have to be pretty high to get these people to move to another site to play
games

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dotcoma
some good news at last! (you gotta be really retarded to play facebook games)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Not for the developers of those games who still have bills to pay.

~~~
djcapelis
So then it's your position that security companies shouldn't offer any new
technology to combat botnets for fear of putting out of business all the
hardworking botnet developers who have bills to pay?

Those facebook games, and particularly the spammy notifications that some of
them use waste many peoples time and cost society real money everytime anyone
has to skim over some announcement in their feed or see some random
notification.

I join the other people in this thread who have no sympathy for companies
seeing their user bases drop because facebook has made it harder for them to
spam users.

