In a small change, Facebook has stopped allowing application developers to include HTML within the info tab of their applications. While some developers have already adjusted to the new settings not even Zynga has taken notice as FarmVille, the largest application on Facebook, still has some HTML buried in their Page. Granted, this isn’t exactly a mission critical change, but if you are looking to provide custom information, Facebook is suggesting all developers create a custom tab.
If you are the developer of an application, I highly suggest making the change. Additionally, Facebook application pages can provide you with an interesting way to engage new visitors to your application. In other words you should be able to create a pre-installation tab which is used to convince users to install your application. So far I’ve seen no application developers use this strategy at all, however there’s a good chance that a large percentage of visitors to an application’s page fail to make it to the next step of the installation process.
So developers: go create more effective landing tabs for your applications an increase new install conversions! In the meantime, remove HTML from the HTML tab of your application.
The Info tab has the friends-using-this-app section which is important and powerful. yunfortunately you can't put that on a custom tab -or can you?
Comment by Jens Begemann — July 2, 2010 @ 4:11 am
Well this is a part of big strategy; Basically, facebook is trying to remove clutter from profile pages and make it clean so that they can introduce new location based features. The profile page will be confusing if you have lots of things to do on that page.
Comment by Aris — July 15, 2010 @ 4:51 am
I remember MySpace did the same thing. At first they allowed html, then removed straight links.
Comment by LA Personal Trainer — September 13, 2011 @ 11:43 pm