About a month ago I wrote a post with some thoughts on what I felt the impact was on the platform as a result of the UI redesign. Today, I ran across this post on AllFacebook.com titled Top Facebook Applications See 25 Percent Drop In Traffic Since Redesign. Where Nick O’Neil states:
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. A few of those applications were able to withstand the changes but there’s a grim picture being painted weeks after Facebook’s latest redesign.
He goes on to provide some additional statistics and spells out the fact that it’s not all “gloom and doom”. At present, I’m quite skeptical about the Facebook Platform being worthy of the development time and effort in light of the near constantly shifting playing field.
The graphic I included displays the stats for my Facebook Starter Kit application with March 20th (mentioned in the article) highlighted, where it’s clearly visible even this simple application exhibits a similar drop off though I can’t say for sure this wouldn’t have happened naturally as it is a “Seinfeld” of applications.