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How Facebook can dramatically improve Pages

Despite all the bitching and moaning, I think the recent facebook redesign is great. Focusing on the stream, and the ease of sharing a variety of content works very well. But Facebook Pages feel like an afterthought that was tacked on, hacked on, and clearly never thought through. And now, let the Airing of Grievances begin.

1. Music pages need a prominent and centered Music Player. For all the fail of Myspace the one thing they got right is that a band’s page is about its music. The first thing front and center needs to be a Music Player. Instead we get a half-assed music player option which either has to sit quietly in the bottom left hand corner below the fold, or on the Boxes page (if you make Boxes page the default), but then your page looks fairly stupid, because the rest of the good content (Wall) is elsewhere. So - a very quick and dramatic improvement would be to place the Music Player box right at the top of the Wall tab, so that visitors can hear the music and read the news and talk with the band at the same time.
2. A Page’s administrators need a way to get a solid news stream from the page including all comments, likes, and etc. Without this feature it is difficult to communicate with fans. I run a page for my photography on facebook, but I find there is no good way to get all the comments. Instead I have to notice that someone commented, then find the photoset and look at the photoset’s comments to find the actual comment. There is no good way to know that someone’s written on the page’s wall either, unless you have the wall display in Page + Fans mode, and physically check back. A page can only be an effective tool if it enables the administrators to communicate with the people, but without a feed it’s nearly useless.
3. RSS. Come on facebook, it’s 2009! What is the excuse for not having an RSS feed for the page? What’s more, several places on the site have very carefully hidden RSS links (such as Notes), but they don’t even bother putting in the proper HTML LINK element to get it to show up in the browser’s url bar. Get with the program, please.

I don’t doubt that facebook’s engineers are busy cooking up the next redesign and improvement, but I think that if facebook wants Pages to be a successful tool for businesses, bands, and other commercial-ish entities that are starting to make facebook their home, then that area should be their next target for a redesign and rethink.