Facebook Page Box Changes Coming Soon

Facebook is always changing this or that, much to the (usually very temporary) chagrin of all users. There’s a change coming to Facebook pages on August 23, but this time, they’ve let page owners know in advance of the changes.

On August 23, Facebook will be doing away with Boxes on both pages and personal profiles, as well as shrinking the width of Application tabs. You can read their update here, but what does this mean for your blog’s Facebook page?

First, it means that your Boxes tab will disappear. This is the most confusing part to me, and I’m not sure I 100% understand all the implications of this. All Facebook has a great post explaining what will be removed, and they’ve been able to ask Facebook itself for clarification, so I would definitely read their insights.

The other major change is that Application tabs will be shrunk from 760 pixels down to 520 pixels. This is the same size as your Facebook Wall, so where currently Applications are allowed to go “full-width”, on August 23 they’ll only be able to take up the the same amount of space as your Wall.

Here’s an example: I’m using the FBML Application to create a Welcome tab for people who haven’t yet liked my Page, as I know a lot of Savvy Bloggers have done recently. This is what they currently see when they visit my Page:

But starting August 23, they’ll see this:

Ah, see the problem? My “Welcome” image got chopped off in a major sort of way. I’m going to need to resize the image to 520 pixels or less so it doesn’t get cut off.

Facebook is allowing Page adminstrators to preview this, so if you haven’t already, login to your fan page and there will be a message about the changes and you’ll notice that you, as an administrator, are already seeing the changed format.

If you’re using any Applications or custom tabs on your Facebook pages, you’ll want to edit them to comply with the new format if you can. If it’s an external Application that you have no control over, visit the application’s site to see if they’re planning on updating their application to fit the new size (many are, as this change has been in the works for many months now).

Facebook says the changes are designed to “simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers, and enable us to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.” I haven’t seen many people that claim to understand the need for the change, but it does seem like it will streamline things a bit and hopefully make Pages a little easier to create and maintain.

Carrie Isaac doesn’t really understand the need to shrink something’s width when she primarily works on a 21″ iMac, but oh well.