Facebook's Social Plugins

If you are unaware of the power of Facebook and how important it is that your business have a presence on the social networking hub, it is time to start paying attention. That alone might not seem so unique or innovative. But it is the scale and speed at which it is happening that makes it of great importance for Web professionals.
Facebook is big — real big. So big, in fact, that it could ultimately be the one great equalizer — the “one” that could compete with Google for consumer mindshare and perhaps even revenue at some point in the future. So what is this big initiative? Full-on support of the Open Graph.
The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API. The three aspects of this platform (the Facebook API, RDF-based markup and plugins), while seemingly minimalistic and perhaps even innocuous in their separate parts, bring together a near realized vision of a fully social, personalized and semantic Web; the likes of which ’Net professionals have not seen since the term folksonomy entered our lexicon.
While the developer API and Facebook’s support of semantic markup (more on those below) will appeal to developers, Facebook has made the Open Graph easily accessible through plugins. Social plugins from Facebook enable your site to create a more personal, social experience for visitors with just one line of HTML.
It is strongly advised that you modify your privacy policy to inform site visitors that Facebook social plugins are in use.
Facebook also announced a simple, RDF-based markup to make these plugins more meaningful — smarter and richer. The semantic markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page (e.g. a movie or book review, an event, etc.). This automatically enables semantics, the understanding that the user is not just interacting with a Web page but liking a specific kind of thing. This can lead to bucketing of objects and provides an immense amount of personalization including but not limited to detailed recommendations.
The new Facebook API is both elegant and streamlined and makes it easy to access user information (with permission, of course) such as profile data, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/peteprestipino. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but also to prompt for permissions to access user information.
This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users’ tastes — and not just one user but all Facebook users.
Facebook’s adoption of the Open Graph has numerous implications for users, Web publishers, Facebook competitors and the Web in general. As someone responsible for Web success, your focus should be on offering tools that increase relevancy for users and support the interaction with content — wherever users are online.
Facebook’s adoption of the Open Graph has numerous implications for users, Web publishers, Facebook competitors and the Web in general. As someone responsible for Web success, your focus should be on offering tools that increase relevancy for users and support the interaction with content — wherever users are online.
Social Plugins
Like Button
The Like button lets users share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click. The code that you will need to integrate is for an iframe and can be placed very easily. The best feature of this plugin is that webmasters can customize how the link to the Liked site appears on a user’s Facebook profile by adding meta data for title, site name and even an image.
Activity Feed
The Activity Feed plugin shows users what their friends are doing on your website through Likes and comments. One of the most interesting aspects of this plugin is that if a user is logged into Facebook the plugin will automatically be personalized to highlight content from their friends. The plugin is available via a simple iframe code that can be placed on a Web page.
Recommendations
The Recommendations plugin gives users personalized suggestions for pages on your site that they might like. To generate the recommendations, the plugin considers all the social interactions with URLs from your site. For logged-in Facebook users, the
plugin will give preference to and highlight objects their friends have interacted with. You specify a site for which to show recommendations. You cannot currently aggregate across multiple domains.
Like Box
The Like box enables users to Like your Facebook Page and view its stream directly on your website. In addition to giving Facebook Page owners the ability to attract and gain Likes directly from their website, users can see how many others already Like the page and which of their friends Like it, too. Users can also read recent posts from the page and Like the page without needing to visit Facebook. You are able to specify the height and width, number of connections (a sample of users that have Liked the page), and choose whether or not to display the profile stream
for the public profile.
Login with Faces
It makes sense that users are more likely to sign up for your site if they know that their friends or colleagues have done so already. The Login with Faces plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends (in addition to a login button) that have already signed up for your site. Site owners can specify the maximum number of rows of faces to display, and because the plugin dynamically sizes its height, it will show as many friends as will fill the rows specified. The Facepile plugin also shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site but does not include the direct login option.
Comments
The Comments Box easily enables your users to comment on your site’s content — whether it’s for a Web page, article, photo, or other piece of content. Then the user can share the comment on Facebook on their Wall and in their friends’ streams.
Live Stream
The Live Stream plugin lets website or application visitors share activity and comments in real time. The Live Stream Box works best when you are running a real-time event; like live streaming video for concerts, speeches or webcasts, live Web chats, webinars and multiplayer games.