Tabs – Coming Soon to Your Facebook Profile

It appears that Facebook will be adding tabs to profile pages in an effort to tidy the site up. The main driver of this appears to be the clutter of applications that have polluted most people’s profiles. Looking at the screenshots, it appears that they have decided to combine the mini-feed and the wall, which makes sense as it will provide a consolidated view of what is going on with that person over the past few hours or the past six months (depending on how active they are on Facebook).

Another thing of note is Facebook’s attempt to involve the community in the changes. In this post, Carolyn Abram outlines the initiative and invites feedback on the proposed changes as well as ideas for additional improvements (those that are interested can follow the changes by becoming a fan of Facebook Profiles Preview). The people who will likely feel the most impact from these changes are the application developers, who have been given a somewhat vague warning on what this might mean for their apps.

On a side note, I find it interesting that Facebook has created a page rather than a group to spread the word about these changes, leading me back to something that I have been wondering for a while. How long before Facebook merges the groups and pages applications? There really isn’t any need for both. Pages are really just groups on steroids with the sometimes detrimental, sometimes helpful, but nearly always frustrating requirement that users must identify themselves as a fan of a given page in order to join it. As a marketer, I always find myself wondering how many more members a page might have if users could define (or choose from a few options) their association/relationship with the page the same way they can with other users.