This is slightly off topic, but has any experienced an increase in "fake" toasts from facebook mobile? It seems if I haven't used facebook mobile in a few days or I don't respond to their toasts about very minor people in my life uploading a photo, I tend to start getting toasts that say "You have 5 notifications, 3 pokes and 2 messages.", then I open the app and it takes me to an unknown error page.
Am I being too cynical in thinking that Facebook is intentionally misleading its users in an attempt to bump up their metrics? It interests me that they are seeing jumps in their mobile users (and consequently, ad sales) at the same time that I have been receiving more notifications than ever. Interestingly, the slowdown in fake toast notifications coincided with their quarterly earnings report that show mobile ads accounting for an increasingly large portion of revenue and also mentions an increase in mobile user usage.
Comparing Q1 with Q2 with Q3, Q2-Q3 showed double the increase in ad revenue percent from mobile (59% to 62% to 66%). Maybe this is just all anecdotal evidence, but it seems like these sort of fake notifications should either not be sent out (failure of the system that keeps track of what user receives what toasts) or there was a conscious effort to send these notifications....
If anyone cares, I went and looked at their metrics and it seems that Q2 to Q3 was one of their biggest increases in mobile alone(albeit not by a whole lot) in quite a while, yet if you look at the raw user metrics over all platforms, it was slower than almost every other quarter in terms of users gained. I'm not sure if this adds any credibility to my wild theory, but it does at least show there is something affecting the increase in mobile usage, although that could just be market factors.
Interestingly, Twitter's metrics don't appear to show any similar rise in the rate of adoption.
I use gmail's filter to dump them and 99% of my emails to various labels. Once every 2-4 weeks, when I am in the mood, I check them out then delete them all. :-)
Am I being too cynical in thinking that Facebook is intentionally misleading its users in an attempt to bump up their metrics? It interests me that they are seeing jumps in their mobile users (and consequently, ad sales) at the same time that I have been receiving more notifications than ever. Interestingly, the slowdown in fake toast notifications coincided with their quarterly earnings report that show mobile ads accounting for an increasingly large portion of revenue and also mentions an increase in mobile user usage.
Comparing Q1 with Q2 with Q3, Q2-Q3 showed double the increase in ad revenue percent from mobile (59% to 62% to 66%). Maybe this is just all anecdotal evidence, but it seems like these sort of fake notifications should either not be sent out (failure of the system that keeps track of what user receives what toasts) or there was a conscious effort to send these notifications....