A few months back, Facebook brought some changes in the user profile. One of these changes was to place photos on the top of the user profile. Another was to categorise people in the friend list according to groups. The changes were restricted to profile design only, but now page designs will also see a similar type of refurbishment. There won’t be much differences between the design of a user profile and that of a page.
In December, due to sheer negligence by Facebook employees, the changes got revealed, but Facebook was quick to fix it and within a very brief span of time, Facebook pulled it down. And now, the revamped version is finally launched officially. The more important than the changes in the design are the facilities offered to page administrators. In the official page, Facebook said that this update will, “help Page admins manage communications, express their brands, and increase engagement.”
A page administrator would be able to perform actions which a user does. For example, a page can like another page or can leave a comment on another page. Also, when the page admin will log in on Facebook as a page, he will see notifications that would inform him what comments people have left and instead of friend request he will get to know the number of likes the page has received.
Doing away the Facebook markup language is associated with the update. Facebook’s Nikolay Valtchanov writes, “With our recent launch of Requests and the support for iframe on Pages Tabs, we are now ready to move forward with our previously announced plans to deprecate FBMLnd FBJS as a primary technology for building apps on Facebook. On March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app.” Page administrators can now use simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript frameset to build iframe apps which will run across Facebook. The new way to build tabs will second using social plugins and the open graph API in the apps.
The security issues will be taken care of by the “signed requests” as it will make it easy for the admins to acess security information between the applications and the website itself. Valtchanov explains, “When a user lands on the Facebook page, she will see your page tab added in the left-hand menu. When a user selects your app in the left-hand menu, the app will received the signed request parameter with one additional parameter, page, a JSON array which contains the ID of the Facebook page your tab is hosted within, a boolean (liked) indicating whether or not a user has liked the page, and a boolean (admin) indicating whether or not the user is an ‘admin’ of the page along with the user info array. If a user has authorized your application, the signed request will also contain an access token for the current viewing user so you can personalize your application for them.”
All in all, this move will surely benefit the page admins. Admins until March 10 to check and see what their page will look like and make the necessary changes before launching the new page, after which the pages what automatically get updated to the new design. You can also take the Page Tour or rad the manual to learn more about new design.