Wednesdays and Thursdays see a lot of buzz about new apps. To get a jump on the big launches of the week, which mostly happen Wednesday night into Thursday morning because of the way Apple’s charts work, journalists keep an eye on the iTunes App Stores for New Zealand and Australia, because they get updated earlier due to their time zones.
And it seems that this look into the future has revealed a new app coming from Facebook that hasn’t been made available in the U.S. just yet. It’s called Pages Manager, and as TechCrunch reports, it looks to do exactly what the name implies: It’ll help you manage your Facebook Pages.
Pages on Facebook are those often more commercial- or fan-oriented areas where users can “Like” something. Coca-Cola has a Facebook Page, for example, where users can interact with the brand, see photos, and get information about Coke and the company behind it. They’re easy to create and just about anyone can build one, though (shameless self-promotion incoming: I’ve even created one for my book).
Facebook offers a lot of tools through its website for managing those pages, which are as much a vehicle for users who make up a specific group or who like certain things as they are for companies and brands. From a mobile standpoint, however, keeping up with a Facebook Page is a lot more difficult. Facebook looks to change that with its new app, and it seems specifically interested in helping people who have multiple pages to manage.
From a design standpoint, Pages Manager looks a lot like the standard Facebook app, with the difference that separate Pages can be accessed from the left-side menu. There, Facebook provides all the analytics information available to Page administrators on its regular website, showing how many people are liking your Page, talking about it, spreading its content and so forth.
Facebook’s continuing mobile strategy seems to be an intelligent one: Rather than make one big app that does everything, the company is separating features into smaller, tighter single apps. The plus side of this is that smaller apps are easier for Facebook to troubleshoot and manage, and they make the overall experience better for users. Already Facebook has separated out its chat feature as Facebook Messenger, and now Pages are being pulled into a separate app as well. There are probably a few other features that would make good one-off apps and make them more appealing for mobile users, as well.
At the moment, though, Pages Manager seems stuck in the Pacific, or at least, it’s trickling out to users in different areas at a slow pace. New Zealand and Australian users have access to the app, and supposedly so do some in Ireland. As for the U.S., well, we’ll just have to wait for Facebook to pull the trigger.
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