Facebook announced yesterday on their blog that they are finally making a Platform-wide migration away from FBML and towards standardization on IFrames as a mechanism for displaying content, on Canvas applications as well as Page tabs. This is fantastic news for developers! Particularly for Pages, where this kind of support has never been available, we expect that our abilities will grow to:
- Use of jQuery. As well as other standard web development libraries such as Prototype to provide compelling JavaScript-based user interactions.
- Provide no-click startup for Flash. Currently, Flash videos and other content must be clicked to start playing within these environments on Facebook. Our contention that brands should be able to determine their user experience is finally taking hold, which is exciting.
- Provide Facebook accessibility for Silverlight. Previously, I thought that we might be able to shoehorn Silverlight content into Facebook via a loophole in which an IFrame could be loaded when an image was clicked, but Facebook eventually closed that hole. With the FBML support for Silverlight completely non-existent it left developers who wanted to target Silverlight stuck between a rock and a hard place until now.
What does this mean for brands seeking to leverage Facebook to connect to end-users? Easily, it’s a far more interesting and engaging user experience. This great news allows for brands to be able to further express themselves within the Facebook interface, but the fact remains that a substantial number of users prefer Facebook’s far-more-egalitarian user experience over a site like MySpace because of its clean interface. Users also prefer the surfing of Facebook because it doesn’t necessarily mean being inundated with someone’s music choice upon landing on any particular page. I believe that for brands to continue to be successful and viral on Facebook once this change comes forward, they will need to be respectful of that distinction and avoid click-to-play content only when content of an immediate nature (such as a limited-time offer by a brand or a time-sensitive event) is impending. We hope to be able to make similar content, such as the live broadcast of the Red Bull Stratos mission, available via the Red Bull Page on Facebook.
Other Changes
In addition to this change, which should be coming in the next couple of months, Facebook has continued its migration towards full support of the new Graph API, which includes deprecation of uncommonly-used REST API methods and the requirement of OAuth for Canvas and REST API access. They have also cleaned up their developer documentation and moved the list of Preferred Developer Consultants. With the standardization of IFrames as the primary interaction medium for Facebook applications, it will also standardize the way developers work with Platform, as the list of XFBML and FBML elements become basically the same.
We look forward to seeing all of these changes implemented and standardized, and very much look forward to being able to work with our web-standards technologies (like jQuery!) when marketing our clients. It will be exciting to see the new interactivity that brands will be able to leverage before the end of the year.
