Preparing for Upcoming Facebook Changes

As you’ve probably heard by now, there are several upcoming changes to Facebook’s profile pages, many of which could have serious repercussions for application developers.

The essence of the change is meant to clean up the clutter that has become of user profile pages. Rather than trying to cram everything on to one main, flat page, the new profile pages will feature four tabbed sub-pages, dubbed Feed, Info, Photos and Applications.

The challenge these changes present for application developers is that, now that most apps will no longer be featured on the main profile page, how do you make sure you still get a high level of exposure?

Fortunately there’s good advice to be found on how best to integrate your app with the new profile pages.

As Rodney Rumford of FaceReviews.com points out, your focus should be on the news feed:

The Feed tab is the first tab users will see when viewing their profiles and represents their recent activity. So creating compelling Feed stories that relay your users’ engagement with your applications becomes even more important. Time to go back to your creative for the wording and design for maximum engagement and calls to action. Facebook will be giving you new options to create richer Feed stories that will appear front and center on your users’ profiles.

The news feed is just one integration point, however. Blogging on Inside Facebook, Adam Lovallo explains that users will have the option to add up to 6 additional tabs to their profile page for applications of their choosing. He goes on:

Given that application tabs could become the most coveted real estate on the new user profiles, developers should work to provide a compelling tab experience for their existing users. In theory, the application tabs should disproportionately benefit the more engaging applications, but even for these “deeper” apps the benefits of the tabs could be somewhat impacted by the introduction of the boxes tab.

Other integration points, according to Lovallo, include:

• Application Boxes Tab
• Narrow Column Profile Box
• Application Info Sections
• Publisher Tool

It is more important than ever to understand each of these integration points and how your app can best leverage each of them. Because once apps are no longer featured on the main profile page it won’t be nearly as easy to get exposure for your app, so you have to get creative. Another good resource for learning about these important integration points comes from Facebook themselves, where they describe the new design platform changes.

Of course, as Nick O’Neill points out over at AllFacebook, Facebook so far has left more questions than answers with their announcement of the pending changes. One thing is for sure, however: if you’re an application developer, these changes WILL impact your business.

What are you doing to prepare?