Why would a facebook application's daily active user's drop so much so quick?

Hmm… I’d have to say that if the app didn’t have good ‘stickiness’ (ie reason to come back to it) you’d have a lot of initial traffic at first (at launch) ... and then a steep drop off the next day.

Maybe Facebook has something to do with it?

No this application has been around since the beginning of the platform and has millions of users

Sounds like a bug, Facebook shutting them off, performance issues or a mass exodus (which is unlikely)

Depending on the type of app, it might get significantly higher usage on, say, weekdays than on weekends.

Can you be more specific about which app it was or the type of app?

is the traffic still low after this one drop? I try not to look at spikes like this… that’s why I love moving averages… makes one a bit less paranoid

no, this is like an all-time low for it. it literally dropped millions of users in a day. and it hasn’t gone back up yet.

solar flare j/k

Did anything change about the application?

not that i know of. i don’t know how to find out, but i still have it and it looks the same to me.

Well then you have a time frame where you can probably easily look for certain changes

1) changes to code
2) changes to app policy
3) launch of new apps

can you say which application this is?

i don’t want to yet. i am a blogger and i would like to break the story….if it is one. lol.

i would go digging around facebook, given their ability to shut off and throttle applications.

Wasn’t there another facebook app which broke some invitation rule and dropped way down… made by slide, if I recall?

Perhaps this app broke one of facebook’s new rules and is in the holding pen (temporarily).

yeah i knew about that. it’s not slide though.

This question may be hard to answer given the amount of information we have to work with.

It’s got to be poker or attack. I have no idea though. GREAT ANSWER.

It could be for the following reasons:
1. Facebook had a FBJS parsing bug which they just fixed yesterday
2. A few days ago they had another bug where some applications weren’t visible in the directory. I believe they did fix it by now.
3. Server Errors: I know a bunch of apps that went down as a result of the application’s web host.
4. The users simply did not like the application. A lot of time people will install applications on facebook and then not use it for days.

You should also ask this question on Facebook’s developer forum. My guess would be they would have more knowledge about such a thing then fellow flutherers.

My best advice would be to send an email to the developers of this facebook application. Considering the fact that you are a blogger for the Silicon Insider, my guess would be they would reply pretty fast with an explanation.

@ben: it was Top Friends

1) It wasn’t Top Friends

2) I don’t write for the Silicon Alley Insider. My name is Calley and for a cute play on words I use the name Silicon Calley.

3) Thanks for the in-depth answer, I will check those things out.

4) If a company has like 10 apps, would a server issue explain the drop in only one of them?

@siliconcalley 4) Since Facebook requires developers to host their own apps, it’s difficult to say for certain without understanding how/whether their apps are segmented across servers. It’s certainly possible, especially if the apps have a lot of traffic.

@siliconcalley: i was referring to Ben as to which app got taken down for breaching facebook’s policies

ahhh i see. sorry.

It could be that they inflated the stats of their own app by creating a bunch of fake facebook accounts and putting the app on the fake profiles. If the accounts were discovered to be fake, then they would have all been deactivated (possibly at the same time) and the app’s stats would take a dive, and it wouldn’t affect the company’s other apps’ numbers.

Just a guess.

Facebook Continues War On App Developers.This Week: (Kills) Super Wall

That was my post, thanks for your help!

@siliconcalley: but you aren’t michael arrington ? or did you just do the research for him ?

i work at techcrunch and when i couldn’t figure out why it was happening, he talked to someone he knew from rockyou and he did it.