Facebook to remove App Profile Pages: What this means for Developers?

No Comments by Rhett Stonelake - Dec 12th, 2011

Per a post late last Friday afternoon on the Facebook Developer Blog, come February 1st, 2012 Facebook will be removing all App Profile Pages. Citing the every growing inconsistencies between the automatically generated App Profiles and the more ubiquitous Facebook Pages (access to Insights and Distribution being key differentiators), Facebook is now deciding to kill off these App Profile Pages. But Why? Removing these profiles and forcing developers to create a Fan Page opens up much greater opportunity for distribution…..now outside of Facebook. As mentioned in the post below, Facebook has now opened the “Add app to Page” dialogue so that developers now have the option for distribution from within the Page Tab, the App itself and external websites. This will be interesting to watch unfold in the coming weeks, we’ll be sure to keep you posted on any news we come across.

Read the full blogpost below

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Via Facebook Developers Blog

Today, we are announcing that we will remove all App Profile Pages on February 1st, 2012. Though similar in appearance, the automatically generated App Profile Pages differ in features from traditional Facebook Pages, and over time the inconsistencies between the two, such as different Insights, APIs, and distribution channels, have become more apparent.

Over the next few weeks, the following banner will appear to admins at the top of the App Profile Page:

If you are an admin of an eligible Facebook Page (must be of the Product/App category and match the app name), you will be prompted with the ability to transfer Likes to this Page. Transferring Likes will give you the ability to publish updates to these users from your new Facebook Page as you do today.

Please note that we will only transfer Likes, and not the content of these Pages. Before you go through the migration process, please ensure you have downloaded all photos, posts, Insights, and any other material that you want to keep. Once you hit the migrate button, the App Profile Page will be deleted.

The Like migration can take up to seven days, and it may be several hours before you see any movement on the Page. If you have a Vanity URL associated with your App Profile Page, we will transfer the Vanity URL to the Facebook Page so long as one doesn’t already exist for the Page.

If no action is taken before February 1st, 2012, your App Profile Page will be deleted and we will send all App Profile Page traffic directly to your app.

For new apps

New apps will not automatically get an App Profile Page. Instead, new apps can choose to create a Facebook Page from the Dev App. Simply visit the Contact Info section in the Advanced tab of the Dev App and click on the “Create Facebook Page” button to create a new Facebook Page.

Hitting Confirm on the next dialog associates the new Facebook Page with your app. By default, the Page is titled “[YOUR_APP_NAME] Community Page”. You can modify this at any time. The Page has a “Go To App” button on the top right and the following links on the left menu:

Block App
Remove App
Contact Developer
Report App

API breaking changes

Related Graph API object connections will be removed on March 1st, 2012 [90-day breaking change]. We will remove the following Graph API App object connections that pertain to information on an App Profile Page:

/albums
/feed
/links
/posts
/reviews
/statuses
/tagged

The documentation has been updated. Please make updates to your code to refrain from calling these APIs.

Adding an app to a Page

To add an app to a Page, Page admins relied on the ‘Add to my Page’ link found on App Profile Pages. For your convenience, we are providing an ‘Add to Page’ dialog that you can now embed on your website, app, or Page tab.

Here is sample code for how to display the dialog, along with documentation.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
      xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
<body>
  <a href="#" onclick=window.open("http://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?
  app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL","PageTab","width=500,height=200");>
  Dialog</a>
</body>
</html>

We will begin displaying the migration banner to a few App Profile Pages today and ramp up the rollout over the next few weeks.

Appbistro