A few posts ago, I wrote a piece about how Facebook ads are more effective when they contain a picture. Facebook is taking this idea to heart with a newly released browser page that emphasizes photos over text for fan pages.

The browser is divided into categories such as Movies, TV, Sports, Politicians and Brands. When you click on a topic, you’re presented with a page of icons with a line of text underneath. Clicking the picture will set your phasers on “Like”, clicking the link will take you to the fan page for a look around.

The upside here is that photos are much more compelling than a long list of links. Categorizing works as a suggestive sell figuring if you like the TV show Bones, you’ll probably like Castle.

In addition, the sidebar shows you a list of your friends ranked by how many fan pages you share. This is kind of fun and I was surprised to see who of my friends ranked highest for shared interests. It wasn’t who I thought it would be.

On the marketing end, there’s a lot of good here. The biggest favor is the fact that Facebook has a tab for Brands. That took some guts to put up there because even though the TV shows, Movies and Musicians are all trying to sell their product, it’s not as blatant an advertisement as a branded fan page. It’s kind of like TV Guide listing the commercials as well as the shows.

What I don’t know is how the system is choosing which fan pages to show and in what order. It’s not the same for everyone. I checked with a variety of logins, so it’s not by popularity. It’s probably based on an algorithm that pairs my current interests with similar pages.

The other thing I can’t figure out is how you’re supposed to find the browse page if you don’t have the link. Maybe once they’ve tested this thing they’ll make it a clear button somewhere but at the moment, I don’t see it.

To access the new Facebook Browser Page click: http://www.facebook.com/pages/browser.php

What do you think of the new page? Useful tool or just another place to waste some time?