Breaking Facebook News: With the new facebook profile design imminent; some changes are coming to facebook and the News Feed. If you have an application on facebook you should be looking into the changes in the news feed templates and how you want your stories published into the news feed. There are a variety of ways that information can be displayed in the news feed.

The Feed tab is the first tab users will see when viewing their profiles and represents their recent activity. So creating compelling Feed stories that relay your users’ engagement with your applications becomes even more important. Time to go back to your creative for the wording and design for maximum engagement and calls to action. Facebook will be giving you new options to create richer Feed stories that will appear front and center on your users’ profiles.

Feed stories come in three sizes: one line, short, and full.

One line stories say what they have to say briefly and concisely, in just one line of text, like “Jan reviewed a movie on blippr.”

According to facebook:
Short stories are more involved than one line stories. We render short stories in various predefined layouts (like we do today); currently there’s one default layout, but more are coming soon.

Full stories provide you with the opportunity to make your stories as expressive as possible with few limitations, similar to how Wall attachments work today. But given their size (500 pixels wide by up to 700 pixels tall), we feel that users will probably display short stories in many cases, so make sure your short stories are just as engaging.

All Feed stories are template based. You need to provide at least a one line story template, but we encourage you to create templates for all three sizes for the best user experience. This way, your users can decide how big of a story they want to show on their profiles. If you don’t supply a story size, that size never appears as an option to the user.

Facebook will aggregate one line and (if possible) short stories, but due to their nature and size, full stories won’t get aggregated. Once you have ideas for the kinds of stories you want to create, you should create the templates for them.

You need to pay attention because facebook will announce a day where the old methods will no longer work and all apps must conform tho the new methods.

Technorati Tags: facebook, news feed

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