Changes to the Application About Page

Starting tonight, we are converting Facebook Application About pages to use the Facebook Pages infrastructure and format. This change enriches application About Pages and provides additional functionality. Users can become fans of your application and review it. Adding an application is different from becoming a fan of the application, users can choose either or both. Every Application Developer automatically becomes becomes an administrator of the About Page. Admins can send updates to their applications' fans and add other applications (for example, Photos) to your About Page.

This change also improves your application's statistics. These new statistics include more comprehensive usage statistics, detailed HTTP Requests and add and removal statistics.

There are subtle differences between regular Facebook Pages and application About pages. For example, the Reviews application is installed on About pages by default and cannot be removed. Your application’s About page cannot have a Mini-Feed.

All FBML tags that work with Facebook Pages continue to work on the new About Pages.

As for the Facebook API, you can use the Pages.getInfo API call to retrieve information regarding your About Page, but it returns information for these fields only: name, pic_big, pic_small, pic, pic_square, pic_large, type, and has_added_app. The other fields are specific to standard Facebook Pages and depend on the different Page categories. If you use the Fql.query API call to query the FQL page table, it returns the same values as the Pages.getInfo call. The Pages.isAppAdded and Pages.isAdmin methods behave normally, while Pages.isFan does not work on About pages. The Pages.isAdmin call returns the current developers of an application. Since Application About Pages cannot have a Mini-Feed, Feed.publishTemplatizedAction does not work for About pages.

A few developers have created Pages for their applications so that they can use the additional functionality provided by Pages. If you did this, you can transfer the fans and reviews from your existing Page to the new application About Page. Please send us an email at app-about-page@publists.facebook.com with your application ID or application key, Page ID and the developer’s user ID. The developer requesting the migration should be an admin of the original Page. If you choose to migrate your existing Page we will delete it after the migration completes.

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