Does Playfish have any special benefits? They use bookmarks in notifications!
12.01.2010
For a period of time, developers could send Facebook notifications with bookmarks.
Last week, we've seen something that we've never seen before - an "Add Bookmark" button in a Facebook notification from a game from Playfish (see screenshots below). Playfish is a Facebook game developer, recently acquired by EA.
Why is this important?
That's obvious. Facebook is going through a big redesign and platform changes - which direclty impacts developers and their games and applications.
As some of you might now, notifications are going to be gone from the Facebook platform. That's big problem especially for game developers, as one of the only channel for communicating directly with the Facebook users is gone. Facebook will replace this with several channels like e-mails and bookmarked applications.
This means judging by the changes Facebook is doing in the new design, a lot will matter on if your game will be bookmarked or not, rather then today's "Someone visited your farm" notifications.
We see most of the Facebook Platform developers out there promoting bookmarks inside applications, but we have never seen them being promoted inside a notification. Also the official Facebook documentation says which tags you can use - and that doesn't seem to allow it.
So why is Playfish allowed to do this? Is this some sort of small hack or getting around the platform features? We have tried to replicate this or adding the official bookmark tabs, but it didn't work. We have reached out to Facebook for a comment on this story.
Updated! We have received an official reaction from Facebook: "Last week a bug allowed developers to display the “Add Bookmark” button in notifications for two days. We reached out to the small number of developers involved and asked them to remove the button, citing Policy V10 ( http://developers.facebook.com/policy/), and they quickly complied. Within 48 hours we fixed the bug to prevent the button from being rendered in notifications.
As you mentioned, in the coming weeks and months, additional communication channels will be opened to developers, including email, news in the Games and Applications Dashboards and Counters on the homepage near bookmarked applications, to give developers more direct and efficient ways to reach users."
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