Hasta La Vista FBML: The death of Facebook Markup Language and why you should care. Posted on February 24, 2011 Post a comment

Last fall Facebook made a big announcement that is set to happen in a few days―the end of FBML. As marketers, we’ve gotten used to constant, sometimes minute-by-minute changes in the rules of how to play in Facebook, but this change is a big deal. Seminal even. Why? Because it takes major constraints off of building rich brand experiences inside of Facebook and let’s us go to a whole new level.

Up until now, creating a brand experience meant creating an application in FBML and uploading it to the brand page, then constantly tweaking it to reflect the ongoing and unexpected changes in Facebook. While FBML gave us the opportunity to create a consistent brand impression with these applications, it came with major limitations. Smart developers created work-arounds to achieve as good of an experience as possible, but FBML definitely hamstrung them.

As of March 11, Facebook is shelving FBML and all new pages will be created in iFrames. An iFrame is simply a mechanism for housing content hosted anywhere using the same coding and development tools that we use to make websites, but wrapped in the Facebook shell. Now we can add in all the web development fanciness and ajax-y goodness we could never do before.

This change will give us freedom and flexibility, and since we are using common web development tools, it lowers the cost of development and broadens the pool of developers who can create for Facebook, That will lead to an explosion of new, deeper, and richer brand experiences in Facebook, experiences that will now be on par with those found on a traditional dotcom page.

We believe this change will further blur the lines between a brand’s dotcom presence and it’s Facebook presence, and we will begin to see more convergence of the two in really powerful ways. The brand will truly live where consumers live, whether that is in Facebook or on a brand’s dotcom site, with a truly consistent brand experience.

The shackles are off, so get ready to serve up branded content and new, more robust ways to use Facebook.