Ryan Merket’s Blog

Facebook announced yesterday a new site of APIs they are referring to as “Permissions APIs”. These new APIs will finally give sites such as adonomics.com and developeranalytics.com the needed data to actually have accurate data. Application developers will be able to grant these companies access to their metrics by allowing their applications to call admin.getDailyMetrics.

With the permissions API, an application can authorize another application to call certain API methods on its behalf. The application naturally can revoke this access whenever necessary. At this time, the permissions API allows applications to grant others access to three methods under the admin namespace – admin.getAppProperties, admin.getAllocation, admin.getDailyMetrics More methods and namespaces will be added to the list going forward as needed.

Now, Adonomics will actually have real data to base their valuations on. In the past, companies had to take an applications daily active users number and multiply it by the percentage Facebook gave (ie: Scrabulous has 694,511 daily active users, which was %21 of their total installs — if you do the math that is somewhere around 3,300,000 — not quite accurate.

On top of detailed daily active users, the metrics companies will have a plethora of data to store and analyze. According to the Facebook developers wiki, here is the data that they can now pull:

• daily_active_users — (The number of daily active users.)
• unique_adds — (The number of users who added your application.)
• unique_removes — (The number of users who removed your application.)
• unique_blocks — (The number of users who blocked your application.)
• unique_unblocks — (The number of users who unblocked your application.)
• api_calls — (The number of API calls made by your application.)
• unique_api_calls — (The number of users on whose behalf your application made API calls.)
• canvas_page_views — (The number of canvas page views.)
• unique_canvas_page_views — (The number of users who viewed your application’s canvas page.)
• canvas_http_request_time_avg — (The average time to fulfill an HTTP request to your application’s canvas page.)
• canvas_fbml_render_time_avg — (The average time to render FBML on your application’s canvas page.)