Monday, February 21, 2011

Facebook Page Owners, Your pages will be a changing!

Here Ye, Here Ye!

Well this probably isn't the biggest news around but Facebook will be forcing Fan Pages into the new Profile view layout. Like the proverbial square peg. Not really that bad but if your a fan of the Tabs at the top of the page get ready to suck it up.


There's actually some good points, new features and per Facebook mandate a whole bunch of Buggy items. Ah we do so love programming in the Facebook API, it's like the wild west. There's a new sheriff in town and his name is Reggie Zuckerberg! But per my mandate, I do digress.

Here's what we see as ultimately cool about the changes:

  • FB did seem to listen and in the new layout are still allowing a default landing page. Important news for biz's that brand their page for new fans. But per the FB bug mandate on a few of my pages some tabs (now links under the logo image) do not show up in the list. History has shown that in a few weeks they'll just be there.
  • The new layout is nice and looks like profiles allowing for recent images to be prominently displayed at the top.
  • Custom App's that define a avatar for the App get a nice FavIcon style link in the new layout.
  • As of yet though, the continued support for FBML App don't have a way to customize the FavIcon for the link. You get the ugly <> representation next to the link text. How bogus (and not an issue w/beloved Tabs). There may be a way to do this, more to come.
  • The new "Use facebook as" feature.
That's right folks, you can now post to a FB user as your Fan Page! This is a pretty cool new feature. Look for it on the upper right side of the page under the Admins Facepile.

As someone who is doing a lot of custom facebook app development I am glad that we can easily brand the custom links for our app's.

It is quite important for Fan Pages to be able to highlight custom content to their fans. Custom content makes one fan page stand out over another.



Click to enlarge


Overall this is what i'd call one of the least painful forced changes that has come down the pike. I can certainly understand your imense trepidation about the upcoming changes but I'd say relax and go with the flow on this one.

Like you have a choice anyway (Check your page after 03/12/2011).

Not!

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