Last night I was checking my Facebook Page and a huge message pane was covering the top of my Page Wall. Apparently, the October deadline Facebook set for all apps and tab pages to be secure (https) has been extended until November 7  and Facebook was even nice enough to provide a list of apps on my Page that aren’t secure with links to report them to the developers. Only one problem… 3 of the 5 were their own apps.

The screen shot below has been cropped to fit the width of the column. Click to view the full image.

Needless to say, this announcement caused a fair bit of panic and I spent a couple hours answering questions and even had to talk a couple of hysterical folks down off a ledge.

I’m assuming that the script that Facebook is using to determine which of our apps aren’t secure isn’t working properly. The message disappeared within a few minutes and people stopped reporting seeing it so Facebook must have discovered the mistake and pulled it, but I’m wondering if we’ll get any official explanation from them.

To add insult to injury, have you ever seen a typo in an official Facebook warning before? I haven’t, but I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as “secure browswing”.

Have you noticed how when you post a status update on Facebook, either on your profile or Page, at first there will be a flury of comments but after an hour or so the conversation dies out? That’s one of the limitations of most social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Unlike blogs, where I’ve had comment threads stay active for months, on social networks, comment conversations have a very short lifespan.

When we post a status update on Facebook it shows up in our friends’ and fans’ news feeds and hopefully they see it and comment. The problem is that after they comment they’ll only see additional comments and perhaps comment again to keep the conversation going as long as they continue to monitor that particular update. The only person who gets a notification each time a comment is posted is the person who posted the status update and, in most cases, within a short period of time, most conversations are over.

Let’s suppose that you haven’t checked your news feed in several hours and you see that one of your friends had posted something of interest earlier in the day and you feel like commenting. The last comment is from 6 hours ago but you comment anyway. Here’s the thing. The person who posted the status update will get a notification and will probably see your comment and may post a reply but no one else who had commented will see it. No problem, crank that sucker back up. Scan through the list of comments and reply to things others said and mention them by name and in most cases (depending on their privacy settings) as you’re typing their name it will become highlighted, which means it’s been tagged. You don’t even need to put the @ symbol in front of the name. You can even delete their last name if you want. Now, when you post your comment, anyone you tagged will get a notification.

Thanks to Deanna Walz Kastrinos for the heads up on this, but she discovered it’s also possible to tag people as your Page as long as you’re tagging them in a status update on your own Page and you can only tag people who have commented to that specific update. Normally, the only way they would know you’d replied to them would be if they checked the update periodically, but if you tag them, they’ll get a notification. Check out the screen shot below. I tagged three people in my comment and you’ll notice that they’re names are blue. If you moused over their names in the actual comment their photo would pop up and the name would be linked to their Facebook profile, and of course, each one of them received a notification that I’d replied to them when I posted that update.

This is an awesome option for Page owners and Facebook has clearly thought this one through completely and come up with a brilliant solution. My concern all along has been that if they allowed Pages to tag people it would be a spammers dream, but by only allowing us to tag people on our own Pages and then, only the people who have commented to that specific update, they’ve eliminated the spam potential but given Page owners a very valuable tool.

Click here to see a status update I posted on my Page with me tagging the people who are commenting to see this in action. Feel free to comment if you’d like now that anyone can comment on a Page without having to Like it first.

This morning I posted a couple of comments in reply to others’ comments on some of my own status updates on my Social Identities Facebook Page. Shortly thereafter, I received a Notification that I had commented to myself. Okay, so now Facebook has me talking to myself. Wait… what?… Stop talking to me I’m trying to type here… Oh, that was me talking to me?… Hang on a second and let me finish… Hey, if you’re going to keep talking to me you can just type this post yourself… Oh, you think you can do a better job?… Okay, I’m leaving, you go ahead and do my work today… I don’t care who finishes this post, why don’t you do it?… Wait, what?… You already did?

If you have an iframe tab page on your Facebook Page, such as a custom landing page, you need to host anything that is called into the iframe on a secure server or anyone using Facebook in secure mode will get a security certificate error and won’t be able to see what’s on the tab page. This has been the case since Facebook switched from FBML to iframes a few months ago but as of today (October 1st), it is mandatory.

If you use one of the iframe apps to create your tab page, like Static HTML, in most cases the HTML text will be hosted on a secure server for you, so for anyone who has a strictly text-based tab page, this won’t apply to you. Once you add a graphic, photo, video, or form to that page, it does, and all of those things will need to be hosted on a secure server and most apps don’t do that for you. So, what do you do if you don’t have secure hosting already? Here are your options.

1. Contact your hosting company and tell them you need an SSL certificate for your domain. Most companies will charge a fee for this, typically $5 a month or so but some will offer it to their virtual hosting clients at not charge. Alternatively, you can pay for your own certificate, in which case there is an annual fee ranging anywhere from $50 to $150 a year. The second option is good for those of you who would have another purpose for a secure domain, like an ecommerce website. For the rest of you, I suggest going through your hosting company.

2. Set up an Amazon S3 account. It only takes a matter of minutes and you’ll get 5GB gigabytes of storage a month for free and then it’s extremely cheap if you use more. For most of you it won’t cost you anything for the first year and will then be only pennies per month after that.

3. Open a Dropbox account. Once you have downloaded the Dropbox application to your hard drive you simply drag your files into the “public” folder and then use the provided link to add the graphics to your tab page. Dropbox is free for up to 2GB of storage, which will be more than enough for most everyone.

Edit: A questions was asked in the comments that made me realize I forgot to mention a simple step to make sure your Dropbox hosted graphics were secure. Simply add an s to the http:// part of the Dropbox URL so it’s https://dl.dropbox.com…

Shameless self promotion alert: If you use Social Identities to design your custom landing page or other tab page, we host the graphics for our clients on a secure server at no additional charge.

FACEBOOK JUST RELEASED THEIR PRICE GRID FOR MEMBERSHIP. $9.99 PER MONTH FOR GOLD MEMBER SERVICES, $6.99 PER MONTH FOR SILVER MEMBER SERVICES, $3.99 PER MONTH FOR BRONZE MEMBER SERVICES, FREE IF YOU COPY AND PASTE THIS MESSAGE BEFORE MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. WHEN YOU SIGN ON TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL BE PROMPTED FOR PAYMENT INFO…IT IS OFFICIAL IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES

Here we go again with yet another ridiculous rumor making the rounds and as usual, it’s so outrageous one finds it hard to believe that anyone would take it seriously and start sharing it, yet thousands of people are spreading this and going into hysterics. Soon, I’m sure people will be flinging themselves from tall buildings.

Log out of Facebook and then take a look at the login screen. See that part where it says it’s “free and always will be?” Facebook makes billions of dollars in revenue from advertisers who happily pay to market their products and services to the 800 million members of Facebook, do you seriously believe they would begin charging users too?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that this crazy rumor was true. Can you imagine Facebook giving everyone the option to continue using Facebook for free as long as they copied and pasted a poorly written message to their Walls? That wouldn’t make much sense now, would it?

For those of you who actually took this seriously and participated in spreading this by sharing it with your friends, I offer the following tip: If you get a letter from a very polite Nigerian prince who is being forced to leave his country and will share half of his $50 million  fortune with you if you will just give him access to your bank account so he can deposit the money, email me first so I can handle the transaction for you so you don’t get scammed. A $500 payment to my PayPal account will cover everything.

Edit: Here’s the official word from Facebook.

I’ve seen a lot of people asking where the Link button on their Facebook profile went. You know, the one that used to be next to the  ”Add Photo” button, just above the status update field? It also seems a lot of those people think they can’t post links anymore. The truth is that yes, the button has been removed but you can still post links in your updates by either typing or pasting the URL right into the status update along with anything you want to say about it. If you type a space after the URL you’ll also still get the preview as you did before and you can still edit the title and description in that preview before you post your update.

All this time I thought the disappearing button was a bug caused by Facebook’s latest security updates, but alas, that is not the case. Facebook has actually removed the button on purpose. Click here to read all of the instructions for posting links, photos and videos.

Where is the button to add a link when I post?

We’ve removed this button, but you can still share links whenever you want. To share a link, just enter the URL directly into the “What’s on your mind?” box at the top of your profile or home page. You may include a message next to your link if you like. Be sure to set privacy before you post, then click the Post button.

Here’s the thing. As usual, I dont’ think anyone at Facebook really thought this through. Whereas before, when you added a link using the Link button, the actual URL didn’t show in the text of your status update but NOW, it does show. In cases where you’re linking to a blog post with an extremely long URL the entire URL is visible which not only looks tacky but also uses characters you might have wanted to use for your update text.

Edit: Thanks to Cfrey for this tip in the comments but there is a work around to the long URL issue. Type the status update and then type or paste the URL of the link you want to add. Type a space after the URL and the usual preview will appear. You can now delete the URL in the update field before you post and voila, no URL in your update text but the URL and preview below will still be there.

By the way, the Link button is still there on Pages and has only been removed from personal profile pages.