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Facebook announced awhile back that they would be making significant changes to how Profile Pages and Fan Pages are displayed, mainly, they would be narrowing the page width to 520 px wide, and would be doing away with profile boxes. For anyone who has custom tab applications that are sized to anything other than 520 px wide, this is going to be a problem and will require you to tweak those tab apps. Today, as I logged in to one of the many Facebook Pages that I am admin for, I saw a little box at the top saying essentially, now is the time to make any changes, as the new 520 px wide pages will take effect the week of August 23rd, 2010. Check out the official announcement from the Facebook Developer’s blog.

It appears while many brands are pussy-footing around building out Facebook Fans through their brand pages, K2 walked into town, swung the saloon doors wide open, and just started shooting. Several articles picked up on the fact that K2 recently put a redirect up from their corporate website, and sent all traffic for  limited time to their Fan Page on Facebook. A visitor would default to an application tab that asked for a “Like” in exchange for a sneak preview of their 2010/2011 product line. This raises a lot of questions. By redirecting all site visits to their Facebook Page, are they duping unsuspected visitors to click the “Like” button to get them to the content they were looking for? The point has been made that for many unsuspecting web searchers, this might be a poor SEO strategy, sort of the antichrist version of SEO. Here’s the deal: if you don’t want to “Like” K2, then you can wait 2 weeks to see the product line when their site goes back up. Is it risky? Will someone skip this and then go to the Rossignol site, pissed off that K2 inserted a gatekeeper in the form of a Facebook “Like” as a magic password? I doubt it. I think it’s a bold strategy that wouldn’t work for everyone. Kind of like the kid on skis who hucks the biggest cliff first, the one that everyone else is too afraid to attempt. That kid may not stick the landing, but you have to admire the gusto.

Here are some articles with more details:

Is a Facebook Like Button Click for Website Access Evil?

K2 Skis Redirects Entire Company Website To Facebook

This article is very disturbing. Apparently Facebook is trying to tie use of 3rd-party developed applications that live on the Tabs of brand Fan Pages with advertising sales. Here is an excerpt below:

“This afternoon Facebook announced via the developer forum that Facebook Pages now need to be authenticated in order to have landing tabs. This means any new visitor to your Facebook Page will not be able to land on a custom tab unless you have greater than 10,000 fans or the Page administrator has worked with an ads account representative. This is a massive blow to smaller companies (or individuals) looking to build their presence through Facebook Pages.”

If this is in fact true, it creates an advantage for brands who can buy their way into developing a tab app. Some smaller scrappier brands have invested in developing tab apps as a way to create engagement and boost their fan numbers. Now they will need to pay, or have 10,000 fans to be “authenticated.”

Here is a real world scenario: SLC-based developer Welikesmall built a robust tab application for Benjamin Moore Paints Fan Page. At the time the application was launched, Benjamin Moore had roughly 5,700 fans. They spent a lot of money to build and launch the application, then had a PR and paid-media drive to bring more visitors to that page. A very publicly-reported campaign, rumored to be in the neighborhood of 15 million dollars, including TV, print, and a high-percentage spent on social media. One could assume they spent a lot on ads with Facebook, and they would have had no problem launching the campaign with “authenticated” status, due to their ad buy. The goals were to gain more Fans, and have visitors participate in their Forum, part of the application that Welikesmall built. A month after launching the application, Benjamin Moore has over 15,000 fans.

Benjamin Moore Experts Facebook App

What do you think of this move by Facebook?

A lot in the news lately about concerns over Facebook Privacy Policy changes and settings. At the end of the day, we as users choose to use Facebook or not. Some of us are addicted to it. I’m really glad Consumer Reports is now as concerned about how we manage our existence on Facebook, in the same way they are about sticky gas pedals on Toyotas and fold down gates on baby cribs, as if they ever have been able to save us from ourselves. Here’s the rub: Facebook provides a variety of Privacy controls that people have access to to limit how much of their stuff is out there for everyone to see. If you look at the article from Consumer Reports, please consider the advice on Privacy Settings. It takes 2 seconds to globally set all of your information to viewable only by Friends. Everyone should do this, unless you are using your Facebook profile for business networking. Go to Account, then choose Privacy Settings, and go through the list and change everything to be viewable by Friends or Friends of Friends only.

Change your Facebook Privacy Settings.

I’ve seen this term getting tossed around a lot lately, the splinternet, more so in the last few weeks than ever before. After all, Apple claims to have sold over 1 million iPad devices in 28 days (about half as long as it took them to sell 1 million first generation iPhones). Facebook has begun colonizing web content on other site experiences by rolling out their “Like” feature. The rumors out there estimated that over 50,000 external sites had already implemented the simple line of code from Facebook in just the first week it was released, so visitors to these external sites could share content within Facebook. Then there is Google. Google has benefited and profited mightily from bringing the web together, and serving ads within alongside the order inherent in the chaos of the web. But this chaos of information, neatly indexed and ranked for relevancy and recency is not the endgame any longer. Facebook is colonizing content on the web that is locking Google out behind their user’s IDs, and Apple is pushing and perpetuating their own proprietary platforms. And they are controlling every aspect of that experience: from apps to ads to analytics.

To the casual web user, this concept is maybe too high-level to be aware of over the course of everyday web browsing, status updates, and app usage. This is all pretty new stuff. What do you think? Bernoff’s article seems to set up this epic battle of Apple vs. Facebook. I’m not so sure if it’s one vs. the other. I think it’s more like this:  Apple+Facebook+Google= a totally new web experience.

Thoughts?

If you are developing Facebook apps, you probably already know this. If you are an agency or client thinking about hiring someone to develop a Facebook app for you, this post will hopefully give you some guidelines so you can keep it real. And not have your developer want to kill you.

Everybody wants a Newsfeed. We are entering the dawn of the Newsfeed Spam era on Facebook.

If you create an application for fans (or now they should be called Likers) and expect to have a newsfeed article distributed in that person’s feed when they interact with your app, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. First you have to develop an application that users must add, and allow permissions to publish stories to their wall and newsfeed. You can then have the application live in a tab on your Fan Page (this is optional. You can also direct people to the App’s url to interact with it, but it probably should live in a tab. More on why you should do this later. That’s another post). One note, your application can’t truly live within the tab in static FBML. The app has to be hosted externally. But you can have a static landing page or “jump page” that is contained within a tab. Think of it as this: the tab contains a landing page with a Call To Action (something like “Go To The Application. The user clicks this, and then is redirected to the application URL).

2.  Keep the text of the newsfeed under 420 characters. Otherwise it will generate an error and not publish. Tell the copywriter to keep it in his pants.

3. You can have a small image contained within the newsfeed, up to 90px X 90px.  You don’t have much control over the placement of the image within the newsfeed. So don’t even think about asking your developer to move the image around. That will only lead to despair.

4. You can also have the App icon show up in the feed. This is usually a small 16px X 16px thumbnail, like a website’s favicon. Give some thought to a good icon for your app.

An example of a Facebook Newsfeed generated from a 3rd-paty App.

Questions? What do you think of Facebook apps? Use them? Hate them?