Bryan Landers

I have 2 Facebook apps I maintain (Card Karma and 3goodthings.me). When I setup these apps, I customized the App Profile Pages since Facebook was directing internal searches there (both from the main search box in the main nav bar as well as the Applications Page.) I started noticing that many Facebook apps had Pages categorized as a “Brands & Products > App” which they were using for the like box on their destination website and elsewhere online. Sometimes this was because the Facebook app was used only for Facebook Connect authentication within a larger external project. For Connect-only apps, Facebook can redirect from the App Profile Page (https://apps.facebook.com/app_name_here) to a Page if you enter that as the Canvas URL. Sometimes though, even canvas apps were using a Page in addition to their App Profile Page. I found this confusing because the App Profile Page had the “Go to App” button, which was a very clear and desirable call-to-action for users checking out the app.

I kept looking around online (the Facebook Stackoverflow, like box documentation, the old developer forums, Google…) to find a definitive answer to which page to use for collecting likes for my apps, but I never found one…until now.

Facebook has announced on their developer blog that they are killing App Profile Pages by February 1, 2012. Existing apps have until then to migrate their likes and vanity URL (sorry, no content from your wall or photos will be transferred - booo!) to another Page. If you need to migrate your App Profile Page, make sure you’ve set the category of your Page to “Brands & Products > App” or else it won’t show up in the drop-down menu of Pages. For new apps, the UX is much clearer now. You’ll see a “Create Facebook Page” button in the Contact Info section of your app settings. The Page selected there will then display the “Go to App” button to the right of the Page’s title (next to the “Like” button if the user viewing the Page hasn’t liked it yet.)

So there you have it. Bye bye to App Profile Pages. Use a Facebook Page for your app and let’s hope the likes you collect there never have to be awkwardly transferred again!

Counter-Intuitive How To

Currently, to copy list recipients from one MailChimp list to another you have to do the following tedious steps.

Click on ‘Lists’ in the main nav.

Click on the list you want to copy from.

Click the ‘view all subscribers’ button.

Select the recipients you want to copy, click on the ‘bulk actions’ link and pick the list you want from ‘copy to’.

The Problem

Why can I never remember this flow? Because, when I want to copy recipients into a list, I’m in that list! On top of that, if I somehow remember that I need to take the action from the list I want to copy from (which would be exporting, I suppose), I can’t find the option for the life of me. I’ve had to Google this 3 times now for myself and clients. MailChimp generally has wonderful UX design, so this is a recurring UX anomaly.

A Solution

What would be much more intuitive would be a clear call-to-action to import or copy from another list into the one I’m currently viewing. Even better, since I find myself going to the ‘Import’ section of the list, how about adding an option there to “import from another list”?

If you haven’t tried MailChimp and you need to manage emailing lists, definitely check them out. Refer to this post if you forget how to copy recipients from one list to another ;)

In the heat of battle I added the Facebook Google Analytics FBML tag to my Card Karma app, but I was getting a bunch of gobbledygook in my Analytics reports that were completely useless. The reason is because, by default, the Analytics Javascript sends the parent frame URL to Google rather than any content loaded inside the Canvas iframe. So, Analytics was only tracking the cryptic Facebook URLs rather than the URLs inside the canvas iframe.

To get some useful data out of your Facebook Canvas application, you have to add the “page” parameter to the fb:google-analytics tag. For example, here’s the code I’m using in my Django app:

<fb:serverFbml style=”width:0;height:0;display:none;”>
<script type=”text/fbml”>
<fb:google-analytics uacct=”UA-55555555-5” page=”{{ request.path }}” />
</script>
</fb:serverFbml>

You’ll need to replace {{ request.path }} with something else if your app is not built using Django to provide the current page’s URL. And, of course, replace the uacct value with your Analytics account id.

To see what else in the Analytics API is supported inside Facebook Canvas apps, check out the official Facebook documentation for the fb:google-analytics tag:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/google-analytics

That’s it! A simple, quick tip, that might save you a few minutes surfing outdated tutorials or docs about Facebook apps.