New Profile Design Update, and New Metrics

As you may have seen on the Facebook Profiles Preview Page last week, we're launching the new profile design in July. We've been going over all the feedback we've received from our developers as well as our users, and have been incorporating some of the valuable feedback into our design.

Launching in July gives us more time to make sure we release the best possible profile design to our users and developers. And this gives you even more time to add more integration points and features to your applications in the beta sandbox.

On that note, we're eager to see what you're creating for the new profile design and would love it if you would submit screen shots showing off your new tabs, profile boxes, and Publisher add-on. We may feature some of the best ones. We'll keep your screen shots confidential and will ask your permission before sharing any of them. Send along your screen shots (please keep them smaller than 500KB, in PNG or JPG format) with a quick note to developer-feedback@facebook.com. Please put [screenshots] in the subject line.

New Metrics

This week we're rolling out new metrics to help you to monitor the success of your applications. We've already started recording 7-day and 30-day metrics, and these numbers will let you track your applications' usage over week-by-week and month-by-month periods.

These two metrics are very important for many applications, as not every good application has its users interacting with them on a daily basis. Rather, they can be just as engaging when a user interacts with them regularly every few days or even a few times a month. For example, applications with many users that highlight rich content like books or movies might not see as much relative activity on a daily basis as applications with higher daily usage, but their overall metrics increase when the activity window is extended over longer periods of time.

The new metrics we're tracking on a weekly and monthly basis include:

• Number of canvas page views (including the number of unique viewers)
• Number of API calls (including the number of unique users on whose behalf your application made the calls)
• Number of active users for the past week and the past month
• Average HTTP request and FBML render times for canvas pages

These metrics will appear in the Facebook Developer application, but may be surfaced elsewhere soon. As we add more metrics to this set, we'll announce those changes here.

We’re still finalizing the design for the API calls and FQL tables that will let you get these metrics. We'll document the API and FQL changes later this week. Look for the announcement on the Platform Status Feed.

Contacting Us

We continue to want to hear from you about the new design and your experiences trying it out. Please report any bugs you see in the new design. Make sure you use the New Profile category. You can help us solve your issue faster by adding one of the following components to your report: Feed, Info Sections, Profile Boxes, Publisher, and Tabs.

You can send us your feedback and ask questions in the New Profile and Related Changes section of the Developer Forum.