Facebook Just Obscured App Reporting

Ok, here is a funny story. At Sun we had a beer bash every Friday. Every bash there would be a drawing for cash, the cash would be a function of how many workstations we had sold that week. Sell 10 workstations the check was $100, sell 100 it was a $1,000 [1] etc. When the checks got too large they started splitting them, had to be present to win. It was a great way to share in the success of the growing company and it made for great attendance at the beer bust! Then the SEC complained. They complained because the number was proportional to sales and that gave out information that was material to the company (it had IPO'ed in 1986). That sucked and sadly the drawings stopped rather than just giving away money on Fridays.

It is entirely possible that Facebook was told to obscure the numbers for the same reasons. Facebook's "value" is tied to its active user count and getting app counts might provide enough information to out perform a less sophisticated investor in the stock. I have no idea if that was the answer but I could imagine it was.

[1] Example numbers, I don't recall what the real numbers were any more, the key fact is that they were proportional to workstation sales.

It seems like Facebook is slapping AppData in the face for reporting on Instagram's drop in DAUs. When companies move away from transparency, it's a move that generally makes me think that they are scared of us seeing a trend.

It's in the best interest of the app economy to have numbers to know what's growing and shrinking and I think this is bad signaling by Facebook.