The facebook redesign is indeed hurting many existing apps. But it's one of those things that hurts in the short term but will help in the long term. Or at le

The facebook redesign is indeed hurting many existing apps. But it's one of those things that hurts in the short term but will help in the long term. Or at least I think that's the intention. Firstly, the type of app that is currently dominant, i.e. the "Joe bit you, CLICK HERE TO BITE HIM BACK" junk, does indeed need to die. I don't think Facebook initially intended for this type of thing to be the dominant form of facebook app, but the amount of distribution power they exposed was a new thing for app developers and users. So we've all installed the zombie app now. Whoopee. It's time to trade away some of the noise that comes from fad apps and instead promote some serious apps. Apps that might be useful to people even when sober. That's why I'm pleased that, alongside the redesign, facebook is exposing more and more of the API you'd need to do serious things on facebook. For example, just a month or two ago they finally released an API call that can create facebook events. In case you hadn't noticed, facebook events are one of the most useful features in FB, and letting third-party apps connect more meaningfully with the built-in Events app will probably make them more useful. That's certainly going to be the case for an app I'm currently building (for a client) that helps you get from "I wanna see a movie next week" to specific plans with a guest list. One of the most common responses to this app is "wow, finally a facebook app that's actually intended to be useful". If zombies and its ilk continue to get prime billing, people will eventually assume that all apps are trivial and the whole platform will be written off by most users. Preventing that is the long-term benefit. Finally, this article is just not credible. Suppose your app started to lose traffic around the time of the redesign. You'd have one of those sad-looking graphs and you'd feel shitty. Maybe you were just unlucky? Maybe August just happened to be the point when your fad started dying down? Why make your app better when you could just blame facebook! That said, Facebook's platform doesn't come with any guarantees. Facebook Inc. can make or break you if they ever decide to care. AFAIK they've been more reasonable than, say, Apple+iPhone, but Facebook dependence is a big risk. This may actually be another thing they should try to solve in order to motivate more serious app development.