XtremelySocial.com » My Info on Facebook

My Info: Highlighting Our User’s Facebook Pages

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:27:03 +0000

I’m very interested in our user’s sharing with us some of the creative custom page tabs they’ve made with the My Info family of custom page tab apps on Facebook. Here’s one fine example. Be sure to share with us what you’ve done with your pages!

Sweet Chalet

I wanted to highlight the Facebook Page from one of our users. Its simple, but elegant and I thought it would be great to share just one idea about what our users have done with the app.

Sweet Chalet is out of Toronto, Ontario and sells cakes and other sweets. You can visit the Sweet Chalet Facebook Page to check them out.

Again, if you have an interesting Facebook Page that uses one of the My Info family of custom page tab apps, please share it with us!

My Info: Added About and Specials Tabs

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:20:38 +0000

We’ve had a lot of requests to allow for more than two (2) custom tabs per Facebook page and so we’ve rolled out two (2) more! In addition to Custom Tab and Welcome Tab, we’ve added an About tab and a Specials tab. If you don’t like the names of these tabs you can always change them to whatever you want through the Admin panel on your Page.

Example Use of My Info: Custom Tab on Facebook

Our Facebook Apps Now Support SSL Secure Browsing

Tim Nicholson — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 19:35:35 +0000

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile was hacked, Facebook has been pushing users toward using secure browsing via SSL. While only a small number of users have made the switch so far, Facebook will be requiring it in the next couple of months.

Now that we have rolled out banner ads on our My Info and Welcome Tab applications (to page admins only, not to viewers of the pages), we have a few cents a day coming in to help us pay the annual fee for an SSL certificate. So we are now supporting SSL throughout all of our Facebook applications. This means My Greetings, My Places, and My Status also have full SSL support.

This means you can turn on Facebook’s secure browsing preference and seamlessly use our Facebook apps without having to switch out of secure mode. While none of our apps send any sensitive data, it was annoying to our users to have to switch back and forth between secure and unsecured modes.

My Info: New Custom Tab Names Coming Soon

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:45:15 +0000

If you have been checking out the My Info app page on Facebook, you’ve probably noticed that I have been hinting that new custom tab names are coming soon. I have done most of the work on this already and am starting to want a few heavy users to try them out and provide feedback on them.

The first batch of custom tab names will be:

Welcome
About Us
About Me
Our Services
Our Specials

These were selected as the most general appeal for both personal profiles and fan pages. Please let us know if you have suggestions for future tab names.

Here is a screenshot of a new Welcome tab I created right on the main My Info fan page

If anyone is interested in more details around how this works, I’ll share that here. Facebook doesn’t allow 3rd party applications to alter the name of the custom tab. We can only set one tab name that is hard-coded for everyone that uses the app. The only way to provide different tab names is to build separate apps for each name. That is precisely why it took so long for me to roll out this feature… because its certainly not feasible to write and maintain a dozen or so different applications.

So what I’ve done is found a creative way to have multiple Facebook applications that all point to the same application source code. So I can maintain the main My Info application code base and all the other “helper” apps with different tab names will naturally be updated.

My Info: Preview New 520px Profile Tab Layout

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:12:37 +0000

In order to help you prepare for Facebook’s new narrower custom profile tabs starting August 23rd, 2010, I have updated My Info to now let you preview custom tabs in either the new narrow 520px layout or the old wider 760px format. This should help you get your custom tab set up nicely for the new size.

Here is a screenshot of My Info previewing the new narrower tab size.

I’m sure everyone knows by now that Facebook will also be removing all custom profile boxes from personal profiles and fan pages starting that same week. That leaves custom profile tabs as your only option, so you will want to make sure to create one before then. You might also like to know that for your fan pages, Facebook will let you specify which tab first displays to new and existing users when they arrive at your page. This will let you set My Info as the default tab.

See the article Facebook Developer Blog: Profile and Page Roadmap Update [Profile Boxes to be Removed Aug 23,2010] for more details.

Facebook Roadmap: Removing All Profile Boxes in Early January

Tim Nicholson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:29:06 +0000

Back in October, Facebook published a “roadmap” of changes that would be taking place then through the beginning of 2010. We have posted articles on this here, but wanted to dig deeper into an area that is going to have a significant impact on users and developers and a huge impact on our My Info custom profile box application.

The net of the announcement is that users will no longer be able to have any custom profile boxes on their Wall or Info tab by early January. The only current functionality that will be supported is the currently available full-page custom tabs. However, these custom application tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide to 520 pixels wide.

I do like the fact that Facebook is now sharing their roadmap ahead of time. Previously, they would simply make massive changes to the site without any real warning. Users would get miffed and complain like crazy. So this is a step in the right direction. However, they still aren’t really explaining very well the reasoning for the changes.

Without getting too “preachy”, I think removing custom profile boxes from user’s Facebook Profiles is silly. They’ve always placed very strict limitations on the number of them, where they appeared, and what could go in them. All those rules were annoying to users and developers, but at least they kept Facebook from looking like a “pimped out” MySpace profile. However, I see no legitimate reason to remove user’s ability to place small boxes of information on their Wall and Info tabs.

Facebook offers up “custom tabs” as an alternative, but we’ve always had custom tabs. My Info fully supports them and they are nice when you want to display a TON of information, but they don’t replace the need to show small bits of information to users on your main profile. This is going to hide most custom information from users unless they take the time to click through each of your custom tabs on your profile.

Also, let’s not forget that the custom profile tabs are getting smaller by about 200 pixels in width. For most people, this won’t be a huge issue, but if you have very large images or a site laid out with multiple columns of specific widths, you will need to adjust your layout.

One direction that I am considering personally, is providing the capability to have a single custom tab that displays information from all of my XtremelySocial Facebook applications. This would allow custom text from My Info combined with your recent Facebook status updates from My Status and even recent gifts given and received from My Greetings. Does this sound like a good idea? Please share your comments and ideas on this.

Here is an exact excerpt from Facebook’s developer site regarding profiles:

Description

Going forward (in the short term) application tabs will be the only way applications can integrate into profiles and Facebook Pages. We will remove profile boxes, application info sections, and the Boxes tab. We are exploring additional ways to enable developers to integrate into profiles and Pages.

Estimated Timing
Early 2010

Details
Application tabs will be the only way to integrate applications into profiles and Pages. Application tabs will shrink from 760 pixels wide (today) to 520* pixels wide to accommodate a slightly revised design. Boxes, info sections, and the Boxes tab will be removed in the near future.

In the longer term we are evaluating a number of new and interesting ways for you to help users express connections to your applications as a part of their identity. You can expect to see some of this thought emerge in future iterations of the profile.

*Note: We previously stated that profile tabs would be shrinking to 510 pixels. Our latest designs indicate they will instead be 520 pixels. We’ll keep this page updated with the latest information.

FAQs

Where will users’ profile boxes go?
Profile boxes will not exist in the near future. Application tabs will be the only way developers can integrate into the profile. If integrations on the profile are an important part of your application, we encourage you to focus development and transition to application tabs.

Will you offer an “Add Profile Tab” button, like some of the other buttons you’ve released?
Yes, we’re hoping to create something like this — most likely in early 2010.

Here is a link to the original article.

My Info: How to Show off your Facebook Page on your Personal Profile

Tim Nicholson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:27:59 +0000

XtremelySocial.com

Promote Your Page Too

Facebook recently rolled out a wizard for creating a profile badge to show off your Facebook page(s). Its an image-based badge that doesn’t require javascript or iframes, so it works just fine in Facebook Profile boxes. Go here to: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/pagebadges.php and cut and paste the resulting code into your My Info profile box.

One nice thing about the badge is that it will display the number of fans that you have. This badge will work for adding a badge to any web page or social networking site as well.

My Info: New Feature! Add Custom Fields to Your Facebook Info Section

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:52:22 +0000

We’re now beta testing a new feature to let you place custom images, links, and text directly onto the Facebook Info Section on your profile. This lets you add just about anything you want under the standard Facebook personal information on your profile.

My Info: Info Section Screenshot

The screenshot above is an example of what I’ve added to my own personal profile. Please note that at this time Facebook does NOT allow this functionality for Facebook Pages, only personal profiles. They say they will be adding this feature to Facebook Pages in the near future and we’ll support that as soon as they do. What better way to add “About Us”, a “Mission Statement”, “Owners”, etc. to your Facebook Page?

Also note that this is a beta test at this point. We’ve enabled the functionality, but so far only I have used it. It does not have a lot of robust error checking at this point. If you get a generic error message saying you didn’t format your fields properly, double check that you have filled out the Label Name and that any image and/or link URL’s are valid. If you have trouble, please do NOT give up… please contact me and I’ll personally help you get things working and fix any bugs that might be causing problems.

My Info: Enhancement: Better Profile Box Preview

Tim Nicholson — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:41:34 +0000

We’ve updated My Info to provide you with a much better preview feature. You can now select whether you want to preview your profile box in Narrow or Wide format. This will let you see more accurately how your profile box will look when its on the wall/narrow or wide side of the boxes tab.

In addition, we updated the link at the top of the profile box to say “Go to My Info”, so it was more clear to your viewers where that link would go. To update your profile box, simply go to My Info one time and the new link text will appear on your profile. The “See All” link is still the same and will point to a full-page view of your profile box information, regardless of whether you have added a custom tab or not. This way users can see all of your profile box information even if it is truncated (cut off) on your wall.

One last minor change we made was to remove the message that appears when editing a Facebook Page about adding the box to your profile. We found that annoying since Facebook won’t let us actually tell if you’ve done that or not. You will still see the warning message when editing a Facebook Page if you have not added My Info to that page. We’ve had many users forget to add My Info to their page and think the application wasn’t working properly when nothing showed up. We hope you enjoy the new enhanced features. As always, let us know if you find any issues with them.

My Info: New Feature: Link to Edit Page

Tim Nicholson — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:29:00 +0000

Some users have found it difficult to add My Info to their business page because Facebook doesn’t let us automate adding a box to a page’s profile like it does for your personal profile. To make things a little easier, we’ve now added instructions at the top of the main My Info page whenever you are editing a business page.

We’ve also added a link to “Edit Page”, next to the page name in the upper left corner of the main My Info page, so you can easily go to editing that page.

We hope you find the new instructions and edit link useful. As always, thanks for using My Info!

My Info: My Profile Box Name Changed to MyInfo

Tim Nicholson — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:26:54 +0000

Facebook required us to change the name of this application to remove the word “profile” from it, so we settled on the name MyInfo. Its short and to the point. We hope you like it. Your profile box and/or custom tab will now show a title of MyInfo, which is generic enough that it should be appropriate for whatever you have placed in your profile box. You may notice that the URL for the application is still http://apps.facebook.com/my-profile-box. We’ll likely have to change that in the future as well, but for now the URL remains the same.

My Info: New Feature! Now Easily Switch Between Editing your Facebook Pages and Personal Profile

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:18:24 +0000

If you are a page administrator for one or more Facebook pages, you are going to love this new feature. Instead of having to click through several links to edit the profile box for your pages, you can now easily click links right within the My Profile Box application. We now find all the pages that you are admin for and display links in the right hand corner to easily switch back and forth between editing various pages and your own personal profile. I hope you enjoy the enhancement. Thanks for being a My Profile Box user! As always, please let me know if you find any bugs in the new features. Also, as a reminder, I am still looking for suggestions for a new name for My Profile Box. Facebook won’t let us use the word “Profile” in our applications anymore. Right now I’m leaning toward just calling it “More Info”. That is short and to the point and generic enough that it should apply to just about any use of the application.

My Info: Possible New Name for My Profile Box – Facebook Harassing Me

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:18:09 +0000

Many of you have been asking if there is a way for you to individually change the name that appears on your profile box or custom tab. Sadly, Facebook does not allow that. The box is hard-coded to whatever I call the application itself. I can set the custom tab title to whatever I want, but it has to be the same for all users.

Also, Facebook is giving me a hard time now about the name “My Profile Box”. They are trying to say they’ve somehow trademarked “Profile Box”. Yeah, like THAT trademark would hold up in court! After “Kleenex” lost their trademark battle years ago, these big companies have just gone to ridiculous levels with their naming rules.

At any rate, I’ve been thinking about changing the name of the app to something simpler anyway. I’ll list a couple of suggestions. Please let me know what you think and PLEASE make suggestions as well. Potential New Names

* Simply “More Info” so its generic enough that it looks OK as a title for just about anything you would put in your profile box

* Simply “My Profile” or something generic like that.

* They say that I can qualify the name by calling it “My Tim Nicholson Profile Box”, which is obviously ridiculous, but I have just bought the domain name xtremelysocial.com as a holding place for all my current and future social networking apps (iGoogle? My Yahoo? MySpace? LinkedIn? etc). So I guess I could call it XS Profile Box or something like that.

What do you guys think??!!??!!

My Info: New Feature: Custom Tabs on your Profile

Tim Nicholson — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:43:15 +0000

New Feature! Now you can use completely different code for a full-page Custom Tab that is completely separate from your existing Profile Box. This will let you place a little content on your profile as you have today and fill up a whole page of content on your own Custom Tab. This opens up a whole world of new possibilities for adding stuff to your profiles.

Don’t worry if you have things already setup exactly the way you want. You don’t need to make any changes. If the code for your Custom Tab is empty, it will still display your main Profile Box code on your Custom Tab if you have added one or do so in the future. This is a brand new feature and as always we need your help in testing it out. If you run into ANY problems, please let us know right away so we can fix them.

Welcome to XtremelySocial!

Tim Nicholson — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:42:00 +0000

One of the great features with this site is that you can log in with your Facebook user ID and password. No need to register with yet another website! You can also post your comments on this site to your Facebook news stream, if you would like. You can see a list of your Facebook friends and their current status. You can easily invite your friends to check out our website as well. New! Now see your whole Facebook friend activity (news) stream!

We plan to add even more Facebook functionality and also add similar features for Twitter, MySpace, and other social networking sites.

XtremelySocial.com is owned by Tim Nicholson and builds socially-connected applications and websites to keep you connected to the people that matter most in your life. This site encompasses all of our internet projects, such as our various Facebook applications and websites.

Our Facebook Applications

My Greetings (formerly WallPoke) allows you to do things to your friends, such as send them a drink, tell them you love them, or cheer on your favorite sports team with various icons. You can also post your mood or your favorite team to your own profile. Currently there are over 400 different greetings icons/actions that you can send to your friends, including smilies, love, holiday greetings, birthday, drinks, cute critters, all major NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, and NCAA team logos, and many more!

My Info (formerly My Profile Box) lets you place any HTML on your Wall or Boxes tab. It even lets you place it on its own dedicated tab. It fully supports the new Facebook profile layout. Cut and paste code snippets from various websites to spruce up your Facebook profile!

My Status shows you all your past Facebook and Twitter status updates and easily lets you update your status on both Facebook and Twitter. It also shows your Twitter friend updates, the public timeline, etc. It fully supports the new Facebook profile layout for placing a box with your recent status updates on your Wall.

Our Websites

PalmZone.net is a site dedicated to publishing useful news and information about Palm-Powered handhelds from all device manufacturers. It is a community-based site where users and casual readers alike are encouraged to participate in discussions and surveys, comment and rate articles, and submit news, software, Palm links, etc.

PdaMobileWeb.com is a comprehensive site index of PDA-friendly websites, covering email, entertainment, finance, news, PDA’s, portals, reference, shopping, sports, tech, travel, and more. It is easy to use and optimized for mobile devices with limited screen space and limited bandwidth connections. The site is designed specifically for Palm PDA’s, Pocket PC’s, and cell phones.

XtremelySocial.com » My Info on Facebook

My Info: Highlighting Our User’s Facebook Pages

Sweet Chalet

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