It seems Facebook made a significant change to the number of updates you can see at anyone time it used to be 5000 now its 250 this means the system has to filter the updates to only show you what is most relevant.

Thanks to Skippy we can now put it back the way it was and restore the feed to its preredesign behaviour:

Login and click on Most Recent scroll to the bottom of the page and click Edit Options on the popup change the number 250 to 5000 and save.

Whats new? Everything!

The entire interface has been redesigned with everything but the chat box moving to the top.

On screen Invites, Inbox, Notifications now live next to the FB logo with their own little icons, your applications or pages are now filtered on the left side of the page and the stream has been made slightly narrower by the looks of it.

Search now dominates the top bar, it's clear Facebook want people to use the Search system much more than they used to.

All "You" controls are now on a single drop down on the top right next to "Profile" and "Home" (including the logout option)

The Right side column is preety much as it was it's the user discovery and advert spot, nothing much new there It even appears to be the same size as the old one.

Facebook pages have changed! although all my code seems to be ok no breaks or copy getting messed up, go check now and see if you need to tweak your custom Facebook page code to accomodtate the new Facebook 2010 redesign.

I don't hate this redesign as much as past tweeks, at least this one appears logical and Seriously fast!

Video from Mashable Facebook introduce the new features:

Yes we all love to hate Facebook, but especially annoying of late is how sloooow Facebook is getting. It reminds me of the Great Myspace Crawl of 2005 all over again, the good news is I think I have found a way to give your account a little bit of a speed boost.

Now first off you could check out Facebook Lite, which is generally a lot quicker and less bug ridden that the main Facebook site. Ok so that's an option but what about normal Facebook.com what can we do to speed that up?

Invites / Events / Groups Slow down

You know all those invites that your friends send you for Farmville and other rubbish well it's those that are contributing to the slow down, you can use a "Remove all Invites" on the invites page to clean out your invites box.

Now reload the page! Notice anything? Yup the counter has gone down a little bit, but some still remain, for some reason Facebook has to go and mark each invite separately as being deleted.

My guess is a similar thing happens on page loads the site goes to check for invites slowing your account down the more invites unread the more locations it needs to check to see if the invite status has been changed.

Removing all your old invites seems to speed things up a little bit and with the general slowness of Facebook every little bit of speed is a welcome boost.

Facebook have a verification form that will allow you to tell them about your brand and your contact details, they will use this to verify that you are the brand controlling the page. It seems that new Facebook pages now have to go through this process before being allowed to go public in the Facebook system.

From reading around the web it seems it can take a while to get verified, Facebook InsideFacebook has a few interesting things to say about the system including the different ways you can prove you control the brand you are verifying:

1. “Add a badge or a Fan Box widget to your website that links to your Facebook Page.”
2. “Add an email address that is officially affiliated with the entity of your Page to your personal Facebook account. You can also add the email address of a company authorized to manage your brand (e.g., management or PR firm).”
3. “Add another admin to your Page who has an email address that is officially affiliated with the entity your Page represents.”

Why verify your Facebook Account

Simply to prove you are the brands controller on Facebook and more importantly to prove that any other "Fan Run" accounts are not under your control. In the future Facebook seem to be rolling out new Admin features to verified accounts first so that's another good reason.

Facebook have released a new little feature that is likely to have a huge impact for charities. Now when a Facebook user "Shares" any update from another user the shared item will carry a (Via Person Name) so everyone knows the original source.

This even works for updates you have posted to your Fan Page and should really help to boost page discovery when users share your page updates, users can if they like remove the VIA it will be interesting to see how this effects page views I fully expect to see an increase in fan interaction as a result of this new feature.

A few days ago I noticed a lot of my female Facebook friends posting colours to their status, asking around it turns out it is all about Bra Colours in support of Breast Cancer Awareness. A lot of people received this message forwarded via friends:

“Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha .”

It seems this has become a bit of a meme and taken on a viral life of it's own, at first no one was sure which Breast Cancer charity specifically started it, a bit of a missed opportunity if you were looking to build brand profile alongside campaign awareness.

To the point that people on Facebook setup a page to support the campaign themselves and give the community a rallying point.

The blog based in Detroit thinks that the campaign may of first been started by a lady in Detroit but it's difficult to verify at this time, it seems at this point that it was a community effort and no charity directly seeded this idea, making it even more interesting.Regardless of who started it what is very clear is it's captured Facebook users and raised a huge amount of awareness, charities can learn a lot from the simplicity and virility of this wonderful awareness raising meme.Now if only a charity has been attached all that good will could of been channeled very effectively into fundraising.

Ah well seems when I reported back in October about a huge reduction in interactions on charity Facebook Pages I wasn't going crasy Facebook really did make a change.

Techcrunch has confirmed that Facebook switched back to using an Algorithm to determine what updates to show to fans, its actually global so is in effect on user to user updates as well.

From March 09 - October 09 Facebook was working more like Twitter where no filtering was applied and any update posted could be seen by anyone logged in at that moment in time.

Things have got a bit better since the October switch over with interactions ticking upwards again but still no where near the March 09 levels.

Facebook are asking for feedback so if you get a survey from them when you Login be sure to give your honest view of how these changes have affected you.

If Facebook continues to use an algorithm to determine how to surface updates to your fans its going to make Fan pages much slower to grow, I have been working on a couple of ideas to maximise the potential of the algorithm so at least we can all make the best of a not ideal situation.

I will put a post together over the coming weeks showing you a few tricks to use the algorithm to your advantage.

The Facebook community has reacted with this status update currently being passed around:

If you don't know, as of today, Facebook will automatically index all your info on Google, which allows everyone to view it. To change this option, go to Settings --> Privacy Settings --> Search --> then UN-CLICK the box that says 'Allow indexing'. Facebook kept this one quiet. Copy and paste onto your status for all your friends ASAP

Now it's not as bad as it first sounds, if you already use the Facebook privacy controls to restrict information to friends or friends of friends Google won't be able to see it. Now would be a good time to double check and if in doubt OPT OUT!

I'll summarise the changes then delve into how it effects you.

• The Boxes Tab is being removed - any content in the tab will be deleted!
• Applications Tab is the new place to host customisations
• Application tabs will be much smaller only 520px before it was 760px
• Updates you post to your page will not automatically appear in fans streams
• You can collect email addresses via your page (Big woop!)

The Boxes Tab is being removed

Facebook is killing off the Boxes Tab this is probably a good thing as it didn't really have much of a purpose anyway, it was very confusing having it there and 90% of the time you want to host an application in its own tab. If you have content in the Boxes tab you need to move it as when the tab is removed so will anything in it!

Applications Tab

Application tab makes sense and streamlines the user experience

The new smaller size of the application area is going to cause a lot of problems for charities ,you need to look at this urgently and see what you going to have to do to make your application fit this smaller size 520px. For many of you this is the worst part of the Facebook Page changes.

Page updates to fans streams

This next one is very interesting and is likely to have a big impact on orgs who aren't ready for it, when you post something to your page it will only appear in your fans streams based on interactions with that post. So likes, comments, shares and page views will be factored in when the system decides if its going to show that post in a fans stream.

I personaly think this is already in place now but I can't prove it

Collect email addresses from your Facebook Page

Facebook are going to make it really easy to collect email addresses via the Facebook Api. I have to say big step backwards this one but given Facebook have destroyed interactions with fans over the last few months this may be a welcome way to salvage some interactions and transfer them outside of Facebook.

Sadly this is a bad day for the charity / non-profit sector who have invested so much in their Facebook pages thus far and could end up causing more than a few charities to just give up on it as the cost of redevelopment out ways the return on investment.

All we can hope is that these changes have a positive impact in the long run, but right now it's difficult to see how any of this is great news in the short term.

*Update - after a night thinking about it and speaking to some folks in NGO's around the world, the general feeling is not great but we can live with it, my initial thoughts on email collection were a bit pissy!

As @AskDebra tweets this could be great for smaller NGO's, but  for my mind there will be a cost / time requirement to setup the email collection on pages and a good E-newsletter service will make all the difference. All being well I will get a Tutorial up on the site to help you Do It Yourself when this feature is launched early in 2010

This guest post was written by Marc Bowker at Quarriers, a very interesting look at how they developed their Facebook presence and the tools they used if you would like to share a "How you did it" with other charities email me john@technicavita.com

What we do

Quarriers is one of the largest social care charities in Scotland with over 150 services across Scotland and in the South West of England. We broadly split these services into four areas of work: Adult Disability, Children & Families, Epilepsy and Young Adults.

Facebook – where it all began

Quarriers have been using Facebook since March 2009 as part of an exercise to establish an online presence for the organisation across the most popular social networks.

We originally set out with the standard ‘friend’ page and initially built up friends who were staff and slowly tapped into their networks to become our friend on Facebook. We populated our page with events and links and that’s pretty much as far as we got.

We then linked our Twitter account directly with our Facebook page so our ‘tweets’ were seen by potentially two separate networks of people keeping them up to date.

As time went on, we realised that you could only message a certain number of people at a time from our ‘friend’ page. After researching what other charities pages looked like on Facebook, we decided to establish a Quarriers Facebook fan page, the main reason for this was that you could simply click ‘send update to fans’ and therefore send a message to all your fans.

Excellent, or so we thought. We really struggled getting above 70 fans even though we had well over 100 friends at the time. But we persevered and added photos, weblinks and linked it directly with our blog so that posts would automatically be placed on Facebook and even added a Twitter tab so fans could see our ‘tweets’.

Within the last 6 weeks we’ve used the ‘Facebook friend suggestion’ tool to recruit ‘mutual friends’ of existing friends which has seen a significant increase, over 350 additional friends. More people to tell about our fan page amongst other things.

However, we really needed to do something with our fan page to make it more appealing and to increase the number of fans we had. But just how would we do this?

Sproutbuilder

Since June, Quarriers have used Sprout and their web based software Sproutbuilder. It was used to create a widget for a campaign we’re running for young homeless people which was posted on our Facebook and Bebo pages. That’s all we had used it for up until we saw a ‘tweet’ from Sprout advertising the fact that you could use Sproutbuilder to create a bespoke Facebook fan page.

Wow, we thought, that’s exactly what we needed!

After looking through the examples of existing fan pages built with Sproutbuilder, we decided to create one of our own.

This was really timely too as we were going through a period of change in terms of restructuring our services into four areas of work and as a result introducing four sub brands including new colours. So our new Facebook fan page would be the first public outing for our new sub brands.

So how did we create it? Fortunately, we had a volunteer working with our Communications Team who had the skills to create a template using Adobe Photoshop. She built three layers which would create the three click through pages of information which you can see on the fan page.

These templates as well as the images and logos were then uploaded to Sproutbuilder where it then allows you to pull in a variety of tools including a slildeshow and twitterfeed which is what we have used.

You can then preview your fan page and see exactly how it will appear to people viewing it on Facebook and make any necessary tweaks.

Once you’re happy, the next step is to make it live on Facebook. This is the trickiest bit, however, Sproutbuilder have a video tutorial which is really useful and provides step by step instructions on how to do it. It involves some fiddly tinkering within Facebook to make your page visible.

Who can see the fan page?

The best thing about the fan page is that you can make it the default landing page so that people who you send the link to will immediately see the bespoke branded page rather than the usual Facebook news feed on your wall. However, the downside is that it’s only people who are not yet fans who will land on the bespoke page.

Anybody who is an existing fan will land on the ‘Wall’ and will therefore have to click the tab that you have assigned to your bespoke page, in our case the ‘About Quarriers’ tab. That said, it’s really new fans you’re trying to attract to your page.

Another hurdle to cross is the fact that you have to actually click something on the fan page to activate it, i.e. make the slideshow and twitterfeed work. Rather than leave people guessing that you have to do this, we put a post-it note up (literally) saying ‘Click to make me work’.

We have tried to keep our fan page functional but simple at the same time by splitting the page into two columns.

When you visit our fan page you’ll see a big Quarriers logo top left. Beneath that is a slideshow with four images that depict the four areas of our work. Below that is a fundraising events section with links to events that people can sign up to.

On the right hand side you begin with a Twitter feed which shows our latest ‘tweet’, you can also click an arrow to display older ‘tweets’. Below that is information about Quarriers which is brief and to the point, however you can click the ‘Read more’ link and it then drops down to display more information depicting the four areas of our work.

Below that is a box displaying a link to our website and also links to all the social networks we’re on including Facebook, Bebo, Twitter and YouTube.

Finally there is box that when you click on it will display our latest blog posts with the option to actually open up our blog in a separate window.

You can find our fan page at http://www.facebook.com/quarriersfans

The final step, now that we had an appealing fan page, was to recruit more fans. In the last week we have used the ‘suggest to friends’ link provided by Facebook which has seen an increase of nearly 100 fans so far. We’ll be asking our Facebook friends to do the same so we can build a solid foundation of fans.

Any feedback or questions can be sent to marc.bowker@quarriers.org.uk

This question comes up a lot so I thought it was time to put a guide together so you can have your own PayPal donation button on your Facebook Page.

What you will need:

• A Facebook Page
• A PayPal Account
• 15 minutes of your time

To get started go to the EDIT screen of your Facebook Page, scroll down to the bottom and look for Application Browser, Click and then do a search on the next page for FBML the programing language that Facebook uses.

The top result should be for the official Facebook FBML application

Click the link and you will arrive at the FBML page, top left is a link that says ADD to PAGE click it and you will get a pop up asking you to select where the FBML box will be installed to.

You may have lots of pages and profiles listed depending on how many pages you are an admin of or applications you have authored.

Now go back to the pages EDIT screen and you should see the FBML box waiting for you.

Click edit and it will take you to a blank form. Open a new browser window or TAB so you can keep where you are at on Facebook

Making a donation button in PayPal

Login over at Paypal.com and goto MERCHANTS look for the BUY NOW link and click it

On the next screen look for DONATION on the left and click it, finally click create buttons now on the donations screen.

Ok now you should see a donation button creation page with some options, set your charity's name and a reference code I would suggest using FB as a reference code so you can track donations coming only from this button!

You can style the button and set a fixed donation amount or let the user decide how much to give, further down in the advanced options you can set a url to send a donor to after completing their paypal donation.

Once you are happy click CREATE BUTTON you will then see a box with some code in it, this is your donation button in its raw form.

Bringing Facebook and Paypal together

Copy the code and go back to your Facebook FBML box you created earlier you should still be in the edit window.

Paste the PayPal code into the FBML box and click SAVE. That's it your done!

If you now go to your Facebook Page and click the Boxes Tab you can see your donation button, click the pen marker on that box and you can send the button to the side bar of the Facebook Page so every visitor can see it.

FBML is very powerful and you can even use standard HTML to style text or add images take a look at BullyingUK's Facebook page for an idea of what you can do.

A status update doesn't appear in a users stream the same way a link does but either way both are more prominent in a users stream than before. Also interactions are shown to users friends more prominently so "should" be more viral.

Even with TwitterFeed posting status updates from the RSS I was still posting my usual fundraising links in as well..... guess what off the cliff like a lemming.

If the new Facebook is working those links should still be getting a similar level or higher of interactions!!!

I've turned off Twitterfeed on Friday and next week will return to doing it the old way, I have spoken to some other orgs about their numbers and their reporting similar but not as extreme results as well. It's possible I have compounded the problem by using Twitterfeed and users just aren't liking the or seeing the message but it's a status update so it "should" be just as good as a link or better.

Have you seen something similar? Can you share your date with me either privately or to add to this page? Am I wrong?

Let me know in the comments or @johncarnell

You can see an example of the right hand side of every page of this site, clicking the Facebook "Chicklet" will open up a window on Facebook the user logs in and can share the page with all their friends.

Added bonus the "Chicklet" then updates it's self with a counter showing how many users have shared the page.

Integrating Facebook Share is really easy its one line of code that looks like this.

<a name="fb_share" type="box_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

Add the code to your website side bar or embed it directly into your articles, while your add it add the TweetMeMe retweet button to make it easy for your visitors to share your pages to Twitter works the same way as Facebook Connect.

Here is the code:

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_source = 'YOURTWITTERID';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>

Redesigned Facebook feeds

The center column of the Facebook page has been give a make over, it now features two option above the feed.

• Newsfeeds work the same way as the old facebook any activity on the site your friends make over a number of days are show here.

• Latest News shows you the very latest activity around the site from friends, think of this as a Twitter like stream of as it happens updates

Used together they can keep you up to date much more easily with whats happening with your network of friends no matter if you login 5 times a day or just once a month

Facebook changes under the hood

The changes aren't just on the surface however and these under the hood changes should be of interest to everyone with a stake in promoting the brands across Facebook.

• Facebook pages now appear in the Newsfeed and Latest news in a much more visible way making them hugely more viral than they were before.

• The Suggest to friend tool now pulls suggestions from two friends at a time rather than just one, again helping Fan Brand Pages to become more visible.

Causes is like a Facebook Fan Page but for charities although its no substitute for a Fan Page it can be a useful extra tool to help you find new supporters.

To get started you register your cause, then invite your friends to join each friend that joins generates a social action for their friends to see.

Each member of the "Cause" can be sent a thank you note if they invite friends, you can give them "props" for the support (each of these generates an action in that users social stream great advertising)

Tip: Wait a few days before sending a thank you or a props, this prompts the supporter and also catches any of their friends that might of missed their initial interactions.

You can send emails to all your Cause supporters:

Causes admins can send emails to all supporters but supporters have to enabled the email opt in or they will never receive it.

Announcement instead:

To work around this problem causes also includes and announcement option in fact I would suggest using announcements in addition of the email option. An announcement appears in the users home screen not in their inbox, on Facebook the benefit of this is users don't see them as spam more as a feature of the Facebook profile. Even so don't abuse it but it can be a much more powerful and inoffensive way of getting the word out about a given project or event.

Causes is the best Facebook app for pulling together supporters quickly and effortlessly once you reach about 500 supporters you should start to see explosive growth with 10's then hundreds of new supporters joining every day.

Facebook groups are a great way to get supporters involved in a discussion or gathered around a campaign but they are never a substitute for your Facebook Fan Page.

Facebook have imposed a limit on groups, you can only send a Facebook Mail if you have LESS than 5000 group members this stops groups from being used by spammers but can also limit your ability to communicate with group members once you go over 5000 group members.

Facebook Fan Pages have NO limitation.

Promoting your group

The best way to get a group started is by asking friends and family and current supporters to join the group and invite their friends to join as well.

Update your status on  Fan Page directing people to your Group and tell them what the purpose of the group is.

It's important that you get wall posts and discussions going on, post pictures anything you have that helps make the group page feel vibrant and reinforces the purpose of the group this will help to generate social interaction by group members. Remember every action a member  does on your group will be seen by their friends who can then decide to join in.

It will start off slowly and then build as more and more people see interactions with your group and jump on board, eventually you will reach a point of critical mass where the new supporters are joining at faster and faster rate.

Moderation

Keep a close eye on your group page and clean up any off topic of spam posts, be mindful of trolls who will just post to get reactions or stir up trouble. If you read a post that is not within the spirit of your campaign or if it attacks another users view point consider removing the post and optionally banning the person who posted it.

It's important to not let the group descend into chaos caused by a few mean spirited members of the group.

You may of found some initial success and had a flood of new Fans only to find it drop off in a few days to a point now where it's now stagnated.

Well here is a really easy bit of advice to help you keep up momentum, Have you asked your fans to use the "Suggest to Friends" tool yet?

Every Facebook page has a link buried under the left hand page navigation as pictured below:

Clicking the "Suggest to Friends" option will open up a panel where that fan can see all their friends and by clicking on each friends picture to highlight every friend will get an invite to join YOUR fan page when the user clicks "Send Invitation".

A Fan can select EVERY friend they have! Friends that are already Fans will be greyed (Ghosted) out making sure they won't receive duplicate invites.

Best of all new fans will start to join as soon as they accept the invite to your page, quick simple and free. Everything I love about Social Media.

You can send all your Fans a message or post a tatus update to your  wall asking fans to "Have you used the Suggest to Friends tool on the Left side menu to tell your friends about us?" this will usual do the trick and get new fans joining your page in just a few hours.

Facebook has many useful tools such as Groups or Events that can make a non-profits life a bit easier and help to draw people to important fundraisers and causes. One of the often over looked features of Facebook is Brand Fan Pages, many non-profits ask why even have a Brand Page on Facebook if you already use Groups or have a profile setup in your charities name.

Well the key difference are Groups have a maximum message limit of 5,000 members, once your group has over 5,000 members you can no longer send the group Facebook messages (Sucks) and for profile pages it's very easy to get yourself banned from Facebook by commenting to much or over inviting people to be friends with you.

A Brand Fan Page is just like a normal Facebook profile accept more than one person can be in control of the page (Admins) allowing multiple staff to login and post to the Brand Page, Pages are also very viral anyone that has become a fan will see updates you post and can Like, Share or Comment the update allowing their friends to interact in the same way.

Think of it as passing along a note only this way potentially thousands of people can see it.

One of the really great things about the Brand Fan Page is the "Suggest to friends link", this allows a Fan to tell their friends  about your Charity /Non-profit with just a few clicks, their friends can then click a link and become a fan directly from their home screen when they login.

Brand Pages support Video, Text, Images and Links so their's a wealth of content you can add to your page, the Facebook community loves to share so update daily and watch your Fan count grow as friends of Fans discover your great content.

Naturally extra visitors to your website from those links you post is an added bonus!

One of Facebook's biggest issues over the years has been it's size, as the site has grown added features and advertising the entire site has started to feel slow and clunky a little like Myspace did when it suffered its mass exodus to Facebook.

Something had to be done and so it came to pass that Facebook would just do a Twitter and provide a super sleek, fast and clean way of interacting with your activity stream site.

As you can see from the login screen, Light and floaty is it's purpose.

Once logged in you will see your activity stream and you will also notice the entire page feels like it has a lot more space, its easy to see what needs your attention, not to mention lightening fast. Notice only one advert on the left hand side?

Facebook is a Social Network originally starting as a closed network for University students, in 2006 Facebook opened it's doors to everyone over the age of 13. Since then Facebook as grown to have over 260,000 members and is currently the largest single network of people next to the Internet itself.

Facebook has a number of features that can help you to reach a wider audience these include:

• Personal Profile - For you as an individual
• Brand Fan Page Profile - Ideal for your Non-profit / Charity to reach more people.
• Groups - Great for organising groups of people around a set topic
• Events - Perfect for organising events and getting RSVP's
• Applications - Addons that give extra features to your profiles.

Facebook has added support for posting to Twitter from your Facebook Fan Page, this has the potential to save Charities / Non-profits a huge amount of time and make your updates much more viral. Whilst I don't think you should start posting to Twitter via your Facebook page it does mean that some updates can be added to Facebook and sent directly to Twitter with just one message.

This has the potential to save you time and in the future we could see Facebook comments and Twitter replies all tracked on the Facebook Fan page. A very cool possibility.

Once you have linked your Fan page to your Twitter account using this page on the Facebook site any post you make to your Facebook page will show up seconds later on Twitter.