breaking news – Stay N Alive

Breaking: Facebook Adds "Add New Tab" to New Design

Picture 4-2.pngFacebook appears to have just launched a previously announced feature to their new design staging area. If you go there you’ll notice a new little “+” sign next to the tabs at the top. Click on this, and now you can choose to add “Posted Items” to the tabs at the top, as well as “Find more applications”. The “Find more applications” feature does not seem to be working yet.

This new feature allowing you to add applications to the tabs menu in the new design was announced previously by Facebook, and is said to allow your application, through just a simple “tab url” in your application settings to appear in the drop-down you can see there now when you click on the “+” sign next to the tabs. This is also consistent with the removal of “adding” an application by Facebook. Instead, you will be able to add “components” of your application to different areas of a user’s profile, which includes the tabs. Your application can have only one tab and works passively by default, meaning you have to click on something for javascript or Flash to auto-play. Nothing has been confirmed on whether Advertisements will be allowed to run within the Tabs on the new design. The tab also defaults to your Application name and cuts off at 15 characters.

See below for some more examples of the new “+” sign, and adding the Posted Items application to the tabs menu in the new design:

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Facebook Getting the Vote Out – but is it Good for Developers?

You’re seeing it here first folks – this morning Facebook announced a new tag on its wiki called . I imagine an announcement from Facebook will come soon on their purposes for this. From the wiki, :

Displays a Rock the Vote widget inline in your application. The text inside the tags is formatted as a hyperlink. When the user clicks the link, a Working Assets US Voter Registration dialog appears. When the user is done, they are prompted to share it with their friends. Then they are returned to your page.

This is particularly suitable for political apps or any app that wants to encourage voter registration.

Now, I’m not that familiar with the whole “Rock the Vote” organization, and I’m very for encouraging voter registration, but isn’t this also giving preferential treatment to other big organizations on Facebook? How did “Credo Mobile” get their sponsorship on this? Does this mean apps and organizations like my company’s client, “Takes All Types” will have their own tags for developers to use too? Has FBML been turned into an advertising tool? As a Facebook Developer myself I’m a little concerned about this one.

To implement the tag, you would do something like this (from the wiki):

Register to vote!

The link looks like this:

 link

And produces a form that looks like this:

rock the vote form, top

The second half of the form looks like this:

rock the vote form, bottom