“As of today, you can build your Page Tab apps using iframes rather than FBML. This means you can now build apps that run across Facebook (including Pages and Canvas applications) using the same simple, standards-based web programming model (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS). In addition, you can easily integrate social plugins and the Graph API within your tab.”

So in a nutshell, here are highlights and lowlights:

1. Tabs are gone, and Pages for brands and businesses look a lot more like personal pages. There is a photo strip above the status update window, much like on personal pages.

2. Navigation links in the left column replace tabs. So if you had a Welcome page that new visitors default to when they visit your brand page, it will still work*, but rather than having a tab at the top of your page, it will show up in the lefthand links.

3. Powerful new feature: admins of Pages can toggle between using Facebook as themselves (John Doe) or the Brand (Acme Widget Company). Social Media marketing managers are going to wet themselves over this change alone.

4. Brands who have invested in the development of FBML tab apps will likely have to rewrite these apps at some point using the new iFrame method, but Facebook’s official word on when FBML will be deprecated and phased out has been vague. The Captain recommends you do it sooner rather than later. That crap should live on your own server anyway.

5. A lot of folks have been complaining about the order of Status Updates: the new change apparently applies a ranking to Status Updates, and the most relevant or popular appear top down, rather than in chronological order. I’d be willing to bet, mateys, that Facebook will change this back to chronological, and/or give users the choice. After all, it wouldn’t really be a status update if “What Are You Doing Right Now” didn’t appear at the top of the list.

What do you think on these new changes? Pirate Booty? Cause for mutiny? Couldn’t give a scurvy rat’s ass? We’d like to know.

It’s hard enough to get tourism destinations to leverage YouTube as a channel for highlighting their video assets. Some will cobble together some in-house clips of b-roll and post them up on their channel. I suppose that’s better than nothing. But the folks from Leavenworth have gone beyond that. They have invested in a story. An elaborate story, featuring a nutcracker named Woody Goomsba. One thing recurring theme I agree with Troy and the Travel2.0 folks on: story first, tools later. YouTube is just the social media tool here. This video would not have 185,000 plus views if it wasn’t a good story. I urge you to also view the behind the scenes video that shows the making of this. Notice the news clips of PR this video generated for Leavenworth. Notice the production values that went into shooting this. So if you are a destination marketing organization, are you investing in the story, or spending too much time messing around with the tools? Top shelf, Leavenworth. The Captain is a fan.

Here’s an example: Joe Smith manages a Facebook Fan Page for Big Giant Ski Resort. He wants to make a Wall post that will appear on Ski Utah’s Facebook Fan Page. Every time he does this, the Wall post originates from his personal login, and appears as from Joe Smith, not Big Giant Ski Resort. But Joe really wants the Wall post to be from his business Fan Page, not from his personal account. Maybe he wants to share ski resort upcoming events with the larger fan base of Ski Utah, whose Fan Page is devoted to promoting all ski related businesses within the state. Maybe Ski Utah wants their members to post events on their Wall to create more content and engagement. This is all hypothetical, of course. But it could apply to any Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) trying to foster more conversation and engagement between their membership base.

There is a hack that makes this easy to do, and it doesn’t require any coding, or installing an app, or any sort of log-in trickery. It involves using the Facebook tagging shorthand “@” symbol while making a Wall post on your own Fan Page, and tagging the page where you want your post to show up. You are not really posting Wall-to-Wall per se. You are creating a Wall post on your own page, but because you have tagged someone else’s page, it will publish on their Wall.

In this scenario, Joe Smith would go to his own business’ Fan page and create a new Wall post, including a tag in the post for the Ski Utah page. Here is an example: “Hey @SkiUtah, we’re having Oktoberfest at the mountain. Check the link below.”

1. start out writing the post on your own Wall. When you type the @ symbol and the first letter of the page you are thinking about, you’ll see a javascript drop down menu with all the Fan Pages or people who your Fan Page is connected with.

2. choose one from the menu, and the text will be highlighted blue, signifying that page or person is tagged, and your post will show up on their Wall after you publish it.

3. go ahead and add a link, attach a photo, whatever you normally do in Wall posts.

4. The “@” tagging doesn’t work from mobile apps, and I’m not sure if it works with any desktop Facebook clients like Seesmic.

Caution: this tagging only works if the Fan Page you are tagging is following your Fan Page. And if you abuse this reciprocal way of posting and tagging to get a Wall Post on the target Fan Page (in this case, the hypothetical Ski Utah page), they might delete your post if they decide it’s inappropriate, or worse, they might stop following your page, which would then take away your ability to tag and post in the future. It’s a good hack, and it gets the job done. But use it wisely, and don’t send relentless Wall Post SPAM.

1. the selection process to find their pro blogger for a season in itself is creating user-generated content. A 2 minute video is required with every application. Tons of people are going to submit. Heck, I’ll bet some marketing staffers at neighboring resorts are going to apply, just for the fun of it. Aye mateys, why not? I’m sure there will be some funny ones that will end up on their YouTube channel later this fall, regardless of who wins the coveted position.

2. Forget about turning screws in the rental shop, bumping chairs, slinging nachos in the bar. This would be the highest paying ski bum job you are going to find in Park City this winter. Most other resorts and DMOs pawn off blogging and content creation to an intern or someone who is currently on-staff and chronically overworked. Kudos for bucking up the cash.

3. Who cares if the person who wins ends up being a tool? The contest is going to generate more PR buzz in the long run just for the high stakes nature.

What do you think? Smart move?

How you use 360 Panorama
You launch the app, hold your phone in the air, tap the screen, then you slowly rotate where you are standing, while passers-by think out loud, what in the fuck is that guy doing? What may seem odd turns sarcastically funny when you look at the result, only the joke is on you. The resulting image is poor quality, with visible overlaps, jagged transitions, hardly something you want to share with anyone you know.

How you use AutoStitch
First of all, you don’t actually shoot through AutoStitch. So it’s not a camera app per se, it’s more of a post processing app. The first time you launch it, you get instructions that tell you to exit the app, and shoot a series of still shots through the native camera, making sure the images overlap in terms of point of view. Once you have created and saved a bunch of successive images to your camera roll, you go back and launch the app, choose the images you want to stitch together, and the app takes it from there. The results are amazing. There is a crop tool inside the app that auto-crops, or allows you to drag the corners for custom cropping, and it then saves a high resolution file to your camera roll.

The images below were shot during a recent weather event that created amazing light and a variety of colors and clouds during sunset. You tell me which image is the result of $2.99 well spent, and which one looks like R2D2 ate a bunch of mushrooms.

Sunset shot with iPhone 3GS and AutoStitch App

Click the image above for a larger version. This was composited by AutoStitch from 19 different still shots. As instructed, I made sure each image overlapped the previous, as I moved from left to right to capture about 180 degrees of this beautiful sunset. Then I launched the app, selected the sequence from my camera roll, and created the pano. I then uploaded straight to my Facebook Wall, and sat back for the oohing and aahing to begin. I even had a professional photographer friend ask what I shot this with. If you want to get AutoStitch, and you are convinced by this review, the good captain is an iTunes affiliate, so click here if you are convinced and want to pony up for AutoStitch.

WTF? Really? I expected so much more from 360 Panorama App

I don’t even know what to say about this. 360 Panorama supposedly uses live video input, and uses GPS pitch, roll, and yaw data and takes the image in realtime, but the results are not very impressive. I can’t recommend this app to anyone, and frankly, can’t believe it ever got approved as a paid app in the first place. Maybe it is a hint of things to come with some cool technology that Occipital is working on, but for a consumer, it’s a dead fish.

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