Facebook Doesn’t Value the Developer Relationship
May 20th, 2010
Yesterday afternoon, Facebook dropped a bomb on the developers and content creators that use Facebook pages to extend their brands into the social web. In a very unprofessional and careless manner, they announced a major policy change by burying it in the middle of a forum thread on the Facebook Developer site.
The specifics of the change are that Facebook Pages with fewer than 10,000 fans (likers?) will no longer be allowed to set their default landing tab to anything other than the Wall or Info tabs.
Imagine being the page administrator, developer or and/or marketer who has invested a lot of time and money into creating a specialized Facebook page landing tab. Suddenly, that tab isn’t the default one any longer, and you’re tearing your hair out trying to find a solution. Here’s an example of a developer’s reaction.
So you post to the Facebook developer forum looking for help, and several other people having the same problem chime in. Finally, someone from Facebook responds:
We apologize for not messaging this earlier. Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager. If you are already working with an account representative, please contact that representative to begin the authentication process. If you do not work with an account representative, you can use this contact form to inquire about working with an account representative.
Are you kidding me!? Really, Facebook? “We apologize for not messaging this earlier!??!” This is a major change to policy that affects page functionality and content development, and it just SLIPPED YOUR MIND!? Did the sticky note fall off of someone’s monitor?
This latest blunder just underscores my previous post on this topic, “Facebook Doesn’t Value the User Relationship.” Facebook doesn’t care about the user, or, as shown by these actions, they don’t care about the developer, either.
A change in policy of this magnitude should have been communicated with the developer and page administrator community well in advance of being enacted. I’m the administrator for nearly a dozen pages – did I receive an e-mail about this? Nope.
If you continue to read through the forum thread, you’ll see that this change will clearly be a problem for a lot of people, especially developers who have invested significant resources into projects that depend on a customized landing page. Getting your page to 10,000 fans is no easy feat, and could very well be impossible for smaller businesses, institutions and brands.
I cannot say this enough – Facebook is not trustworthy. We cannot trust them to make decisions about user privacy. We cannot trust them with our brand. And, we cannot trust them to implement changes to their service that are thoughtfully planned out, announced in advance, and well documented and reviewed.
4 Responses to “Facebook Doesn’t Value the Developer Relationship”
1Andrew Careaga
May 20th, 2010 @ 8:03 am
The trustworthiness issue is key. It seems the company is damaging its brand more and more each day. Maybe I should contact Zuckerberg and offer some crisis communications advice.
2Rachel Reuben
May 20th, 2010 @ 8:15 am
A-MEN!
3Mark Rothbaum
May 20th, 2010 @ 8:26 am
While I’m definitely not a fan of the new Page policy (it appears to be a short-sighted attempt to force you to advertise your Page), I figured I’d share a small piece of advice for Page Admins at colleges and universities.
You can still control what tab people land on when clicking on a link from your own website. Each of the following links goes to a different tab on the Varsity Outreach Page:
Info Tab:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Varsity-Outreach/73985847322?v=info
Admissions Tab:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Varsity-Outreach/73985847322?v=app_42187740676
Communities Tab:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Varsity-Outreach/73985847322?v=app_4949752878
To grab the link to a specific tab, just right-click on the desired tab, and select “Copy Link Location” (at least that’s what the option is called in Firefox).
For those of us who are Facebook Application Developers, this is just one in a series of many curveballs Facebook has thrown at us.
4robinteractive
May 20th, 2010 @ 10:02 am
Consider this. Long explanation, but one possible reason Facebook is doing this is to protect their system from being used for spam and to protect end users from malware:
Web mail services have some pressure to deliver Facebook notification e-mails without moving them to the spam filter. The largest Web mail service, Hotmail, essentially whitelists Facebook messages, according to this post: http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/05/how-microsoft-failed-to-acquire-facebook-for-over-15-billion/
If someone can hack Facebook accounts and use those accounts to suggest Facebook pages to friends of that account, those message notifications land in the real (outside Facebook) inbox of those friends with less likelihood of spam filtering.
Those messages are socially engineered to look legit and get people to click through. When that click-thru is to a Facebook page with a Facebook url, it doesn’t look very suspicious. And when the landing page can be set to any tab, bad things can happen. In the ones I’ve received the last couple days, the Facebook page has automatically redirected me to a malware-loading site in two instances, and in the other simply had a landing page encouraging me to click through to such a site.
This *might* be the reason for Facebook’s change re: landing tabs for pages.
Of course, revenue is likely also a factor: more Facebook advertising.
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