Facebook has today launched a whole new format for Facebook Pages. This has some significant implications for people using our applications (and others). We are really excited about some of the cool new stuff that we will be able to do with this new format. Read on to find out what the big changes are, and what we recommend you do in the mean time. Essentially the changes bring Facebook Pages much more in line with the new personal Timeline pages. There is a one month period during which you can choose to switch to the new format, and on the 30th of March all pages will be automatically switched. There are some big positives that will come from the new format, but also some temporary drawbacks. Because of these temporary drawbacks we recommend that you do not yet upgrade to the new format.

First Up, Some Good Stuff

More Space!

The new format gives us a whole lot more room to play with. The current width we have been developing apps in is 520px, the new format gives us a whopping 810px to work our magic. We will be upgrading and enhancing all of our applications to take advantage of this new space.

Your Existing Tabs Wont Break (mostly anyway)

The new format wont break our existing applications. They will continue to display even if you do choose to switch to the new format, they just wont currently take advantage of the extra room. There are a couple of tricky little bits that you can read about below.

Big Images

The new layout has a big emphasis on images. This is great for everything that you do on your page, and we will be looking to take advantage of this with some nifty things in our applications.

The not so good stuff

Fan-Gating Wont Currently Work

If you are making use of our fan-gating feature in our GoSocial Store application, it will not work correctly. Previously Facebook refreshed the page when a user liked it, but with the new format it does not. This means that the user themselves would need to refresh the page in order to see the content once they had liked your page. This is obviously not ideal. We know that fan-gating is a popular feature for many of you. We are not sure if this was changed deliberately, or whether this will be changed. Either way, we will work to ensure that we have a solution.

You Can’t Set a Default Landing Page

With the new layout the default landing page is the Timeline (new Wall). This can not be changed. In sum, if you are using Wishpond applications (or any others for that matter) we recommend that you hold off on switching to the new format just yet. Of course as the page administrator you can start preparing your page for the changes right now, without having to switch the public view of your page. We will be keeping you up to date with the changes that we are making to our apps during the month – look out for plenty more exciting news. You can get a full run down on all the changes over at www.facebook.com/about/pages.