The f8 conference has heralded a lot of variations in the social media giant Facebook’s layout and features. Changes, both big and small, are making appearances everyday and the latest is that from October 31st, 2011, Facebook would be removing the Discussions tab from all Pages.
The Discussions App that comes by default in Facebook Pages, also known as Discussion Boards, allows Pages to host a basic forum. As per Facebook’s reasoning, to make Pages better it would be preferable that everyone use the Wall. This is apparent in the screenshot, obtained by KarthikK, which is reproduced below:
A transcript of the above screenshot is produced below for your reading convenience:
‘We are Making Pages Better
We want to make sure the tools you use to manage your page are as effective as possible. Here are some updates about how you connect with your audience:
Discussions: The best way to encourage conversation and feedback through posts and comments on your Wall. To focus on this, we’ll be removing the Discussions apps on October 31st. Learn more.’
The “Learn more” link sends you to the Facebook Help Center question “What happened to the Reviews and Discussions tabs on my Facebook Page?” Here’s the answer, which confirms Page administrators can no longer install the app:
We’ve found that the best way to encourage conversation and feedback is through posts and comments on your Wall. We’ve removed these tabs for now as we work on tools to help you moderate and filter content. Our goal is to help you can manage everything from one powerful place. Stay tuned.
Facebook stands for real-time conversational and personal nature of communication, and, ‘Discussions’ which is akin to a forum-style solution, does not fit in this framework. Rolled out years ago along with Pages, the Discussion Boards app was mainly meant to facilitate long drawn-out discussions about different topics on a given Page. According to App Data, the app reached its popularity peak in December 2010, when it had around 55 million monthly active users. The number has now dwindled down to 22 million active users.
It would not be idle to guess that Facebook has noticed the decline in the number of users and decided to take action. The action taken by Facebook, will no doubt offer more visibility to the discussions on the Page’s Wall but is also likely to lead to more confusion.
It is also likely that the newly launched Ticker and the Timeline and Open Graph rollout do not pick up the Discussions tab. Hence, rather than update the app so that it works in sync with the updates to the other services, Facebook decided to just kill the Discussions app.
The social network’s plans to delete old conversations could inconvenience some users and Page administrators, particularly, if they had some important conversions on it. To aggravate matters further, Facebook does not seem to be planning to offer a way to export content from the app before it is killed.
Of late, Facebook Pages has been garnering attention and considering the fact that they haven’t been updated for long, it seems Facebook has now turned their focus to the Pages Wall and are seeking to make it a main stream area to connect and encourage conversation with the users.