Facebook Adds Ajax - Abandoning Page Views?
I noticed a small, but perhaps significant, change in Facebook tonight. Usually when you add more friends to your Facebook account, you need to land on 3 separate pages for each friend: 1) the Requests page; 2) a Request Confirmation/Skip This Step page (I always click 'Skip This Step'), and finally 3) back to the confirmation page. Three page views for each friend added.
But tonight I noticed that the 2nd step has been Ajaxified - meaning you no longer need to land on a Request Confirmation/Skip This Step page. Instead it is an Ajax pop-up. Now, math has never been my strong point -- but doesn't this mean that the normal 3-page process has been whittled down to 1 page? Won't that play havoc with Facebook's precious page views? Weeell, maybe Facebook has realised that the Tyranny of the Page View is over.
Look Ma, no page view!
If my eyes haven't deceived me (and it is late as I write this), then this is a bold move by Facebook and one I heartily applaud. If it's a permanent move and not just a test. Page view stats are an antiquated web stat - and too easily gamed by social networks and blogs - so the sooner we move away from them the better. Anyone else seeing this change in Facebook?
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They're nice UI touches for sure, but I think they've been there a while. I seem to remember the interface like this atleast over the last couple of months, no?
Nielsens tracking software actually would recognize an event like this happening, and class it as a page view.
They have been using the Ajax interface for some time — but only in certain places. You get the Ajax interface if you add a friend from someone else's friend list, but if you add them from a search you still get the three page process.
It seems a little arbitrary and confusing to see the add friend confirmation two different ways across the site.
Yes, it's new. I'm just getting a bunch of new friends request (since my crowd are all 15 years outta college) and just this past weekend did it AJAX me. Definitely wasn't there (for me) in June.
Yes-its new, in the last 24-48 hours for me in the Uk.
The ajax is definitely new for me, because I've been adding friends almost daily for a few months now and always had the 3-page interface. Interested to know if new for others. It's possible FB has been testing it in different places, to different audiences.
Does anyone have more detail on what Samaritan #2 said? i.e. "Nielsens tracking software actually would recognize an event like this happening, and class it as a page view." ??
Facebook uses this UI treatment in a lot of places (message sending and poking, for example), and it definitely makes life a lot easier. I'd bet that making interaction with the site quicker and easier actually keeps people more engaged, thus spending more time with the site, instead of forcing us to wait for entire pages to load every time we do some insignificant action (like the "how do you know this person" page that you always skip).
On top of that, how many page views does this really cut out? I have like 200 friends, so that means that this would subtract 200 page views over the lifetime of my FB use -- not even close to significant, considering I do 60 pageviews every time I browse a photo album. Since this is such an insignificant part of the site, the UI improvement definitely adds more value than an extra skyscraper ad.
it has been ajax-ified (in the US) for a while now...
Wouldn't the Ajax 'lightbox' make a call to a php template from the facebook servers, therefore avoiding a page refresh and cutting out the all page views from this transaction entirely?
And this page took a while to load - must've been the snazzy new R/WW community comment features being implemented! I like the rating system. Cut a deal with MyBlogLog and give us pics too, Richard!
Ajax is cool, especially with social networks that have geotagging:
http://www.ourglobes.com/
oh ya.
A background AJAX request is still regarded as a page view by the webserver - all a page view is is a browser requesting a file from the server. In the background or not, makes no diffrence
A background AJAX request is still regarded as a page view by the webserver - all a page view is is a browser requesting a file from the server. In the background or not, makes no diffrence
Agree ;)
http://www.ebooksbay.org
Yeah I just noticed it too, it almost passed me buy. I've always been a fan of facebooks use of ajax to make task that can be done live and dynamically all in one giant step.
Fake.
This won't affect pageviews if the ajax results in another HTTP request to the web server. The web server will render the fragment in response to the HTTP request and log it. Strictly speaking, it won't know how what it sends back is being rendered client-side, but it doesn't need to: a page view is *usually* an HTTP request being logged, and I don't see why Facebook or anyone else reporting this metric would attempt to filter out HTTP requests originating from an XmlHttpRequest from their pageview numbers.
In any case, when evaluating Facebook, I think that reach is a much better metric anyhow, to begin with.
Reach on its own isn't very valuable Bosko. Windows Live Spaces has double the reach of Facebook, but a fraction of the page views, visits and time spent online at the site.
Richard, the Nielsen tracking software records all calls made to the server, even those that are asynchronous. As far as I know, Nielsen count ALL of these as page views, regardless of just how significant the call is. So Nielsen will definitely account for these type of 'AJAX' interactions.
The problem is with those online measurement companies who merely track URLS (or clickstream), such as Hitwise. They counter this to a certain extent by using ISP logs and as such their sample size is huge and makes up for the deficiencies in tracking. They also deemphasize absolute metrics and use % share of the internet market.
TDub
# 11
A background AJAX request is still regarded as a page view by the webserver - all a page view is is a browser requesting a file from the server. In the background or not, makes no diffrence
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This is 100% correct.
Lightbox, in its raw form, is not AJAX. Lightbox assembles the page on the fly. It builds the page via Javascript and the DOM. No new page requests, just javascript serving up the newly constructed HTML when called upon.
AJAX, on the other hand, will always make a request to your server when it retrieves the files (POST/GET). AJAX can be used in conjunction with Lightbox, but they are not the same thing.
Javascript and building the DOM on the fly does not equal AJAX.
secure lightweight ajax solutions are the way of the future. page views are not. re-write the web.
http://slajax.com
Each request is a request regardless of how its made. Ajax requests may not refresh the entire page containing that small graphic which tracks hits, but I'm sure their server side software can record hits as well.