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Pager Will Let You Build a Website Out of a Facebook Page

No matter the industry, no business is legit these days without its own website and its own Facebook page. Many small companies try to cut costs by passing on the website and simply using a FB page for everything, and that’s where Pager comes in.

Developed during the 24-hour Techcrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon,  Pager is a nifty little hack which helps you leverage Facebook’s API to turn a standard FB page into what looks like a regular website.

Starting with this:

browser-fb

Pager will create this:

browser-site

Page is the work of Alex Ilea, Anton Shevchenko, and Darrel-Day Guerrero, three sleep-deprived engineers. It’s still very rough and requires that you know a lot of coding, but its developers are promising that once it’s done Pager won’t require any special skill.

"The main idea with this hack is to allow small businesses who use Facebook to manage a website," Darrel-Day Guerrero told Techcrunch. "With Facebook, they can just post to Facebook and everyone knows how it works," Alex Ilea said.

I’m not quite sure how one of these faux websites will be connected to a domain (and thus visible to non-Facebook users), but we do know that the current stock theme for Pager is divided into four categories — About, News, Galleries, and Events. The Events and Galleries are self-explanatory while the News page displays your wall posts and the About page presents a business’s contact info and opening hours.

This is a nifty idea on a technical level, but I don’t think it will ever see the light of day. This won’t prove as worry-free as its developers expect, but more importantly I don’t expect that Facebook will take too kindly to Pager.

Facebook has in the past banned browser plugins and other tools which let users manage their Facebook presence by organizing their news feed and rearranging the interface. The social network didn’t want to let anyone interfere with FB’s abilities to control users' social environment, and if it takes a similar position on Pager then it is DOA.

But I could be wrong; Facebook could decide it loves the idea. We’ll have to wait and see.

P.S. And even if I am right we could still see this idea return in the form of a WordPress plugin. I can see how it would be convenient for a business to focus on managing their Facebook page and then let the related website draw all of its content from Facebook. That would cut the workload in half, would it not?

Techcrunch

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Comments


Paul May 4, 2015 um 9:22 am

socialfixer (which makes Facebook usable for those of us with a lot of friends) is still going thank god. If the developer gave up I’d abandon Facebook as it would be too time consuming otherwise.


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