coxy's blog

Today Facebook announced the roll-out of a new feature to the site, touting 'Seamless Browsing' for users. What you can now expect is that Facebook will show any external links in the same window with a Facebook branded frame at the top of the page, allowing you to comment on the page or view your friend's comments.

I can see the social advantages to something like this but think it's a blatant attempt to stop users navigating away from Facebook. The site is at that stage where it has many visitors and needs to keep hold of them - something that MySpace failed to do - and this is just one of the steps to keep visitors in the Facebook empire.

To me, something like this is the complete opposite of 'Seamless Browsing' as you're taking away the control of the page from the web browser and putting it in the hands of another webpage. As you can see from the screenshot, the external URL 'hulu.com' is now situated in the frame and the browser window is showing a 'facebook.com' domain.

Depending on how this is implemented, this could mean the security checks on the external url aren't effective and certainly renders the browser's bookmarking feature useless. I've never been a fan of branded frames like this - and Facebook's is no exception.