Facebook Cookbook - Jay Goldman [23]
Understanding Allocations
Problem
I’m running into an allocated limitation on the number of emails I can send to users per day. I don’t even understand what that means!
Solution
Back in the wild west days of the early Platform launch, you could basically send out as many Notifications and invitations per day as you’d like. This was great from a viral growth perspective, and apps like FunWall and Super Wall shot up into the millions of users range really quickly. The downside was the constant barrage of invites and Notifications that suddenly dropped Facebook’s signal-to-noise ratio down the tubes (Internet tubes, naturally). Facebook responded by imposing a hard cap on the number of invites an app could send out at one time, but crafty developers found ways around it by using a succession of invite screens. Facebook responded again by imposing a hard limit on the number of invites per day, but that was limiting the majority of well-behaved apps to punish the minority of naughty ones.
So, in February 2008, Facebook responded by imposing a sliding scale system, based on how well the things you send out are received. This system, essentially a closed feedback loop, makes a good amount of sense: behave and your users will respond, thereby grading your behavior well and rewarding you with more Notifications that you can send to users who will grade your behavior, etc.
You can find out your app’s allocations by visiting the Allocations tab of the Facebook Insights app at http://www.facebook.com/business/insights/app.php?id=123456&tab=allocations (replacing 12345 with your app’s ID). Figure 2-30 shows an example.
Figure 2-30. Feedback-Based Allocations
Discussion
Allocations work by putting your app into a Threshold Bucket, which thereby imposes an actual threshold. If you take a look at Figure 2-30, you’ll see that the app in the screenshot is allowed to send 15 Notifications per day, which is Threshold Bucket 6 of 15. That means I can move up nine more buckets, with each one giving me some higher number of allocated Notifications. They don’t tell you how many extra Notifications are in each bucket, and it’s not necessarily a linear scale, so it could turn out that buckets 14 and 15 each give you an extra 1,000.
The only allocation that really needs any extra explanation is the last one: “Email disable message location.” Facebook will automatically append a link to disable emails from your app in every email that you send to users. It’s obviously in your best interest that the link be at the bottom of the message, since users are less likely to see it way down there than they are if it comes before your content. In this case, there are only two Buckets, with the first being “Top” and the second being “Bottom.”
NOTE
Jesse Stay, author of the excellent FBML Essentials (O’Reilly) and coauthor of I’m on Facebook—Now What??? (Happy About), gave me some great advice about Notifications. He suggested that you should build a queuing strategy into your app so that you send out less than the maximum number you’re allowed, rather than running into the limit. Monitor the number of people who add/remove your app in the same period and increase the size of the queue (up to the maximum) in response to the add/remove ratio.
Attachments and the Publisher
Problem
According to Dave Morin, senior Platform manager, Facebook’s servers process over a billion messages every day. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if some percentage of them (even a small percentage!) included an attachment promoting my application?
Solution
Attachments are an easy way to make that happen. Prior