What is Facebook’s stance on third party Pages?

November 11th, 2007

By Justin Smith

This week, Facebook launched Pages, a new way for businesses and brands to build a presence on Facebook. Shortly thereafter, Eric Eldon reported that iLike, makers of the popular iLike application on Facebook, had “pre-created 160,000 new advertising ‘Pages,’ using the features that Facebook is launching today for brand advertisers, that include all of a musician’s ‘fans’ and other iLike information.”

Then, on Wednesday, Facebook application developer Trey Philips noted in the Developer discussion forums, “amazing. all the iLike band pages just disappeared.” Eh?

Upon further inspection, this appears to be the case for many iLike pages, but exactly how many is unclear. While many iLike band Pages still exist, like this one for the Dave Matthews Band, others, including the 50 Cent Page featured in this TechCrunch post, have since disappeared.

Apparently, Facebook wants to keep Pages out of the hands of third parties and securely in the hands of the brand owners. This makes sense given how they are positioning Pages to marketers. So what is Facebook’s policy on removing pages? Hope to have comments soon.

[tags]facebook,pages,thirdparty,ilike[/tags]

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8 Responses to “What is Facebook’s stance on third party Pages?”

Neal Says:
November 11th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Justin – great posts. I had no idea about iLike pages disappearing. Wonder what FB fanboys think of this?

Also, I am starting to believe that FB is getting a little too desperate to make money right now. They need to really think about their users first just they way they used to back in the day.
Matt Says:
November 11th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Is anyone convinced that users are a ‘fan’ of Pages?

Most people I talked to didn’t care, or really hated the idea of brand profiles.

I’ve seen them as a user and made a few pages for big brands, but they didn’t do much for either side.
moe Says:
November 12th, 2007 at 7:47 am
A long time ago Mark Zuckberg gave an interview on NPR about facebook users that was really interesting. Basically, he said that users get mad about change but soon embrace it. This happened when facebook opened up to the public and when they launched the newsfeed. Give it time, everyone will start becoming a “fan” to a “facebook page.”
Colin Donald Says:
November 12th, 2007 at 8:42 am
I blogged about a similar issue for page names – who’s going to have ownership of a particular word that’s also a brand name, such as Blockbuster? See here for two Blockbuster pages:

http://if.futurescape.co.uk/2007/11/when-is-a-faceb.html
Facebook's Inconsistent Pages Policy - The Unofficial Facebook Blog Says:
November 12th, 2007 at 11:15 am
[...] Facebook has blocked the majority of them because a number of them have disappeared as Justin Smith reported. Given that Facebook expects brand owners to create the pages, Facebook could technically block all [...]
Ali Says:
November 12th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
This is Ali from iLike.

Here’s the short story… not really much of a story, actually:

Within hours after creating the Pages on Facebook, we found a couple of bugs in the way we had auto-created them, including a number that were not supposed to have been created.

It was our mistake, so to err on the safe side, we voluntarily “unpublished” (but not deleted) all the pages. We’ve solved the issues and have been “republishing” them over the past few days.

Ali Partovi
CEO, iLike
Melissa Says:
November 12th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Does anyone have any insight as to how Facebook determines whether it was the brand owner who created the page? I am seeing a lot of college & university “pages” that don’t look too official … how fast will they be verified/deleted?
David Says:
November 15th, 2008 at 8:11 am
There is no standard it seems. I’ve had fan pages I created for deceased celebrities deleted rather quickly while others still remain. It also appears that fan pages I’ve joined, I am not longer a part of and find myself joining them again.

The whole idea of them patrolling fan pages seems odd when there are fun groups using celebrity names such as “Bobby McFerrin Raped My Grandmother – A Support Group” and “Chuck Norris Once Punch a Man in his Soul”.