John wants to share some level seven Energizing Lotion in FarmVille! How many times have you seen an alike sentence in your Facebook News Feed and either wondered what it means, or removed the message in disgust?Facebook is conscious of the problem. While some users -- 200 million of them, revealed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a Gaming Event in Palo Alto - enjoy playing games on the service, others aren't fascinated.
According to Facebook, users either "love playing games or hate them," and the company so far didn't have "the right tools to allow developers to grow their games while at the same time providing a great user knowledge for non-gamers."
Thus, Facebook has devised a plan to make games less infuriating to non-users and more engaging to gamers at the same time. The first part is comparatively easy: Facebook will simply be showing application stories only to users who are already appealing with the application, meaning that people who don't play Farmville won't have to tolerate Farmville-related posts in their feeds.
If Facebook decides you are engrossed in games, it will be displaying full game stories in the News Feed, as well as adding prominent counts to those stories to highlight tasks that need to be concluded within a game.
Bookmarks will get smarter -- apps will be automatically bookmarked and reordered based on genuine usage. Finally, Facebook will start notifying users when their friends begin playing a game (in addition to highlighting their activity within the game).
From the users' viewpoint, these are welcome changes, particularly for non-gamers who won't be pestered by constant game-related notifications. From the game developers' end, it remains to be seen whether these improvements will alleviate the fact that gaming-related notifications will now be less aggressive than before.
