Tweet Pin It by Geno Thampi - 1/30/2012 4588 Views
It has been a very long time since facebook announced discontinuing the FBML platform. Back in 2010, the plan to adopt iframes instead of FBML was revealed by this social networking giant. This did not stop the facebook business-page admins from creating landing tabs based on FBML because, the tabs are fully functional even today. However, things are about to change very fast now. Facebook has now ended providing support for FBML. If you find a bug or like to know more about FBML, you cannot get official help from facebook. This update happened during the start of the New Year 2012.How long will the existing FBML landing pages work?As you see, it is confirmed that FBML has been deprecated. The tabs, landing pages and apps created with FBML would completely cease to work by June 1st 2012. This means, you have plenty of time (4 months) to convert all the existing FBML stuff into the supported iFrame before FBML RIPs. It can be frustrating to many facebook business page admins as they would have spent plenty of their precious time in designing complicated landing tabs. However, a translation from FBML to iFrame would not be a hard task to accomplish if the existing stuff mainly uses regular HTML and CSS with only a few FBML functions. Convert FBML to iFrameAs already said, a transition from FBML to iFrame would be a breeze if you are an expert coder. What if you are not one of them? Or what if you don’t have enough time to do that? This is where the FBML conversion tools come into play. You can get your existing FBML page converted to iFrame with just a click. Upon a quick search I found this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeKe7zxoq_w about a tool which converts FBML to iFrame in just 30 seconds. There are a plenty of tools available for this purpose. It is Facebook’s tendency to change very often – Be preparedIf you are into social media marketing using facebook, you should be ready to welcome the changes from facebook with open hands. Remember the update from facebook which shrunk the width of the custom FBML tab? Many landing page design were affected with the change in width. And now, the entire scrapping of FBML and transition to iFrame. Facebook Timeline for pagesFacebook has plans to introduce timeline (which is already live for the profiles) to the business fan pages as well. There is no clear mention about when timeline would be available for the fanpages yet. Timeline feature would be a giant leap for business promotion through facebook. We can’t wait to customize our cover image and make a huge impact with timeline for pages. However, we have to wait till facebook thinks about the right time to make timeline available for pages. Bottom lineIt is the nature of facebook to make updates without caring about the efforts done by folks by using the old platforms and features. However, change is mandatory when it comes to implementing newer, better technologies. So let’s welcome the use of iFrames and bid adieu to FBML