Is Facebook Partnering with iPhone to make iFrames? (part 1)

So today is the BIG day!  Do you know why?  Because Facebook is once again changing and evolving!  If you are a business owner, then no doubt you’ve been told that you must have a Facebook Fan Page.  So, without really knowing why or how to actually leverage this medium, the average local business owner went onto Facebook and created their page, hoping to explode their social media marketing.  The next question had to be “Now what? How do I actually use this property to make more money or get more customers?”  Well, that is for a different post.  The reason being it was relatively simple to create a Fan Page.  But to be able to customize it was a little bit tricky.  Facebook has been using its own “language” so to speak, called FBML (FaceBook Markup Language).  So with a little bit of education and guidance, you could do some pretty cool things to modify your Fan Page by installing an application and configuring it.  Facebook made it pretty easy to set up your page, host the images and info, and make it look good.  And most people didn’t need to hire a programmer or coder to get it done.  But that is all going to change starting today.

What the heck is an “iFrame”?

So today is the day when Facebook officially launches its new iframes platform.  (By the way, facebook  iFrames have nothing to do with the iPhone.  So no partnership between Facebook and iPhone… for now.)  And the FBML starts to go “bye-bye”!  Let’s face it…. Facebook wants to dominate the web landscape and is looking to keep more users on their platform longer.  It makes their company more valuable and allows them to monetize it so you can keep using it for free.  So, to allow people to do even more customization on their Fan Pages, Facebook is shifting from its own FBML to the use of iframes.  I can already hear many of you thinking, “What is an iframe anyway?”  Iframe stands for “inline frame” and is simply a way for programmers and/or developers to take an HTML document from one site and embed it inside another HTML document on a website.  Sorry if I lost you there with all the technobabble gobbledygook. It simply means that you can take content from one website that you have and import that content onto another site, such as Facebook.  The good news about this is that you can create pages with a whole lot more customization and get consistent branding between your website and your Fan Page.  The bad news is that it just got way more complicated to actually do it.  This means most business owners are now going to have to hire people like us (shameless self-promotional plug inserted here…lol) to create fan pages and moderate them.  Unless you know certain programming codes and have plenty of time outside of actually doing your business, you are out of luck.  Now, on a brighter note, those of you who have existing FBML fan pages are in luck as Facebook will grandfather your page into this new era.  However, there will be no more direct support of this system and you cannot create any new pages using FBML.  All future pages must be built using the Facebook iframes model.  So how will this all work?

Stay tuned as we will delve into that even deeper in the next episode of ….the Facebook iframes saga!  (basically come back to check on the next post!)

For those of you more savvy about iframes and this new change… whaddya think?  Make a comment, eh?