We haven’t found anything with the Facebook Developer’s platform to be as intriguing as Templatized Feeds. Templatized Feeds were released by Facebook with an assurance that Feeds which are properly constructed would also land up in the News Feed of those friends of the user who sent out the feed who haven’t installed the application. Now that creates a great viral possibility, and we are among the many developers who went ahead and took the pain to modify their feeds to suit the Feed Template formats.

But with no results. We haven’t yet seen our Feeds landing up on non-application users’ News Feeds. We investigated into this, and here’s what we think is critical ot successfully publishing Templatized Feeds to a large number of users on Facebook:

1. Possibility of Aggregation: The TitleTemplate and BodyTemplate fields of the feed must be simple to aid aggregation. Best practice is to have everything other than the {active} parameter in the feed unchanged from feed to feed. The {target} field should not be used, as it reduces the possibility of aggregation.

2. Links: All links in the feed should be accessible to the viewer of the feed without having to add the application. Facebook analyzes the click-stream of the user once he clicks on any of the links in the feed, and records it if installation of the application is needed to view the content behind the link. Forcing an install from any of the links would put the Feed into Facebook’s bad books.

3. Quality of Content: All links in the Feed must point to pages which are relevant to the content of the feed. This means linking everything to the About page of the application might not help. This implies developers might have to put in a good amount of effort into making some pages from their applications viewable without the user having to add the application. Many leading applications seem to have done this, and we’ve done it for iAspire too here.

There’s no guarantee even after you’ve done all the above that your feeds would land into the News Feed of non application users. But without having implemented the above, it seems, there IS a guarantee that your feeds won’t reach too many users ! Take your pick.