The Right Way to Harvest Facebook User Information

Facebook and many of the applications developed on that platform have been cited often for being very loose about security of their user information and inadequate controls regarding user privacy. The most recent fervor and activity is around some most popular Facebook gaming apps providing user information to 3rd party applications for being harvested by internet advertisers and marketers. These marketers typically track such users based on their IDs and cookies — to place 1-on-1 targeted advertisements on web and gaming properties frequently visited by them.

The above method of using personal information hurts the credibility of these FB applications and runs the risk of the user simply exiting the FB application for good — which could have a huge impact on the popularity of these games, their viral ability to attract users through their friends etc.

In contrast, a right and correct way to use such information is to use it for improving the experience of the users within the FB application itself! Claritics is currently implementing a cool data to dashboard analytics solution for a Facebook application. The analytics solution (developed in 3 weeks) is cloud hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance and provides deep insight into the usage of the calendar application along the 3 key axis :

• Revenue (through sale of real and virtual goods)
• Reach (virality aspects of how new users come on board through the friends route)
• Retention (monitoring app user activity, user engagement through campaigns etc.)

Our client is going to be using these analytics insights to :

• Help prioritize the right areas to invest in for future application development (FB based applications put out releases every 1-2 weeks)
• Build a rich application user profile that can help customize the content presented in the application, user specific messages etc. based on engagement levels seen over the last 3-6 months
• Monitor user activity trends in near realtime mode — to assess impact of new application releases

- Jay Bala

1 Comments

1. smisankinopsy, August 5, 2011:

   Hi Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Take care.