Facebook product manager Jared Morgenstern is on stage at the Facebook Gaming event in Palo Alto and after describing the internal codename “Super Mario Party” as “Doing things with your close friends is better than doing things with strangers,” (yes, random) he finally got into what newsfeed changes Facebook will be making with regards to games in order to make the Facebook gaming experience less annoying for both the people who are playing and the people who want nothing to do with games. This is big with regards to exposing users to games. From the Facebook blog … “People who do not play games will only see stories when a particular game is added by a group of friends, instead of ongoing News Feed stories. These dedicated stories will show which friends are playing a game, making it easy to join them. Over the coming months, we plan to launch additional features that provide improved and personalized social games and News Feed experiences. Happy gaming!” Here is an outline of the changes below: Fix Navigation make it more useful 1. Smarter Bookmarks — The left hand panel of bookmarks that just sat there before, will now actually take user behavior into account, using a relevance algorithm i.e # of days in the last 30 days that you’ve used an application. 2. Stronger Re-Engagement Channel Simplifying And Strengthening Behaviors 3. Requests to the Dashboards Understand Our Shared Audience 4. Targeted Stream Posts plus Personalizing Stories. Make Viral Loops More Frictionless 5. Simplified policy changes. Dan Rose closed off the announcement by saying that, “We recognize that some of the things that we’ve done in the past.. sent a signal that maybe we don’t care about games or thought that they should be less prominent” and reaffirmed Facebook’s desire to be the best place in the world to play social games. 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9Authors: Alexia Tsotsis