Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Sharing with New Visitors Via Tabs (or Custom Links)

A tab is just a custom link that your application can create that can be added to any Facebook Page. I cover more about creating a tab for a Facebook Page in Chapter 4, but it's sufficient here to say that this can be done, and it's an emerging market, with entire stores such as AppBistro looking to index these pages for page administrators wanting to find ways to customize their pages. You can see LiveScribe's custom tab in Figure 4-2. In this example, they actually set their custom tab as the page that appears by default as users visit the page. I show you how to do this in Chapter 5.

You may be wondering why they're called “tabs” when they're just links on the left-hand side of a Facebook Page. The truth is they actually used to be tabs. They existed at the top of Facebook Pages as little tabs you could click on. Just recently, Facebook redesigned its Facebook Pages so that all the tabs resided on the left-hand side as links. it's unclear at this time what those will end up being called in the future, but for now, everyone knows them as “tabs.” For that reason, I call them tabs throughout the book.

Custom tabs can be a great way to bring a custom experience to a Facebook Page.

Figure 4-2: The LiveScribe Facebook Page Welcome tab.

Creating your first tab

What I'm about to show you next can automatically increase your value ...