What will the current and upcoming changes to the Facebook platform mean for clients and their existing Fanpages? As Director of Technology (and Director of the “keeping it real committee”), I wanted to give everyone a heads up on the changes, but keep my ‘geek-speak’ to a low. ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’, that’s my motto.
Application Interaction
- There will be no more application-to-user notifications. Meaning the small notification box in the bottom right of the bar on Facebook will no longer go-off when you are notified by an application.
- All correspondence between applications and users will be moved to either:
- The Stream (the Facebook Wall)
- The New Application Dashboard
- Application Invites and requests will be moved (read: buried) to the Inbox, under an Applications section.
- Application News Feed Items will be moved (read: buried) to the new Application Dashboard that shows users 3 sections:
- Your recent activity among applications
- Your friends recent application activity
- Listing of friends and applications they have recently used
- http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/images/0/03/Games-dashboard-annotated.png
- The Application Dashboard will have a little counter that you can increment as alerts, however it doesn’t seem to be an effective alternative to Notifications.
Profile Integration
- There will no longer be “boxes” on profiles.
- There will no longer be “extended profile info” on profiles.
- There will no longer be Profile Sidebar Items.
- All application branding on Profiles / Pages will live as a “Tab.”
- The new width of Profile “Tabs” will be 520px which is down from the 760 pixels as it currently stands.
Odds & Ends
- A lot of the older posting to newsfeed API calls have been deprecated and replaced with new ones.
- Applications will have the ability to prompt user access to their email addresses to send them info/notifications.
- Most of these changes are coming down the pipeline with no clear timeline, but on the upside:
- They usually give 30-60 days before they get rid of something.
- They usually stage a new feature for ~ 30 days before they push them live.
- They’ve added an “Add Bookmark” button for adding your applications to the bottom bar on Facebook easier.
- They’ve made improvements to the native analytics for applications a.k.a “Insights.”
Gamechangers
The Open Graph API will allow any page on the Web to have all the features of a Facebook Page. Once implemented, developers can include a number of Facebook Widgets, like the Fan Box, or leverage any API, which enable the transformation of any Web page so it functions similar to a Facebook Page. This has enormous implications on the way people consume brands with Facebook. It’s essentially having a brand’s Facebook page be their actual web-page.
In the end what Facebook’s team has done seems to be two fold. On one hand, developers will now have less effective tools than they once had to spread their applications but on the other hand, I believe we will begin to see truly creative and effective applications rise to the top. Check out the Facebook Developers Roadmap for more information.
