Have you noticed some “Unnamed Apps” in your Facebook App Developer page?
If you’ve created a Facebook Like Button or other Facebook Social Plugin on your Web page, you may find that when Like Button is first clicked, it creates an “Unnamed App” in your list of apps on Facebook.
There’s a simple explanation for this and, don’t worry, it’s nothing evil!
UPDATE (11.16.11): Facebook recently changed how it handles applying the Social Plugins to an existing Facebook App. Instead of generating a new App ID if you don’t specify a URL that already has one, Facebook now requires that you select from a pulldown list of the Facebook apps you admin, so assign the plugin to an existing app:
This should eliminate the generation of new instances of “Unnamed App”.
There was a rumor going around in early 2010 regarding an unnamed app and the Boxes tab on Facebook personal profiles and the belief it was a Spybot, but the personal-profile Spybot issue is unrelated to this post.
Why you’re generating those Unnamed Apps on Facebook
When you generate a Like button on Facebook’s Social Plugins page, it automatically assigns a new App ID for the button, if it detect that the URL you provide doesn’t already have an App ID associated with it.
<script src=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=245548198790917&xfbml=1″></script>
This new “app” shows up on your developer page as “Unnamed App”.
Why does Facebook generate the AppID parameter with its Social Plugins?
Facebook provides an App ID with its Social Plugins code so that you can get analytics for the URL which your Social Plugin references, via Insights, Facebook’s visitor tracking analytics tool.
Related: How to Create a Facebook Application to Get an App ID for your Website
How to avoid generating the Unnamed Apps — Remove the AppID Parameter
If you don’t need the Insights and want to keep your Developer Page uncluttered, just delete the appId part of the provided JavaScript URL, so it’s just:
<script src=”http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1″></script>
And that’s all there is to it!
