May

Facebook Connect Tips

Filed Under (Facebook) by admin on 15-05-2009

In a world where open social and friend portability has been a big issue for the last six months a potentially huge development happened yesterday and was brought to my attention by Chris Lang. He was telling me a little bit about it and I think it was his friend who’s a plumber and doesn’t know much about computers who actually told him about Facebook Connect being live.

I agree that this is likely to be a very huge development in the social wars. And in case you haven’t been keeping up, social sites and the social Web is the future of what Web 3.0 will be.

“Social networking” just beat porn in terms of the number of searches either last month or in August. So clearly you can see the trend and the writing on the wall.

Now I want to take you through some of Facebook Connect features and speculate on some of the other sites and functionality it might contain.

The only site I’ve currently seen it on is theinsider.com. This is a celebrity gossip site which means I normally wouldn’t bring it to your attention.

But, since it’s the only place where you can test out and get a feel for what Facebook Connect is all about that’s the reason I’m mentioning it to you.

Here’s a screenshot of the home page with the interesting things highlighted (of course if you’re into celebrity gossip what I’ve highlighted may not be as interesting to you at some of the stories).

As you can see there are now two separate logins…one for users who are already members and a new one which allows you to come to the site for the first time and log in using your Facebook credentials.

I played around with this yesterday and was quite impressed with the ease and functionality.

So now go ahead and login by clicking the Facebook button.

You’ll now see this:

As you can see it is a genuine pop up window which means it opens a new browser. So if you have a pop-up blocker turned on within your browser it may block the window. Turn off your pop-up blocker if you need to.

Now once you’re here you have some pretty cool options.

Here’s a pic of what you’ll see when you’re logged in and you click on the home link in the upper left corner.

This is your hub where you can see all your activity. Since I just joined obviously I have nothing in here.

Where you see the yellow arrow is the invite friends button and that will take you to a new screen like a lot of other social networks you’ve seen where you can invite friends from Gmail and Yahoo etc.

Also the three buttons in the left box allow you to add a celebrity, add an obsession, or play a game. As business users I won’t be using this and don’t think you’ll be using these very much.

Now onto the interesting stuff which is the left side of this menu. As you can see by default it drops you on the recent activity link.

When you click on the friends link it takes you to this page:

Again you will see the Big Blue box with invite friends and this takes you to the same screen as the one before where you can invite your Gmail and Yahoo contacts.

As you can also see I have one friend Emily but I don’t know how I got her because I’ve done no friend activity on this site. Maybe it’s like MySpace where you’re automatically friended by Tom when you sign up for an account. Maybe Emily is this site’s owner/webmaster.

I have the ability to write on her wall or send her a message just like I could within Facebook. Note, this writes on her wall within theinsider.com NOT on her Facebook wall.

Also there are three links right above her photo where I can see how many friend requests I’ve sent and how many requests I received.

The private message link is pretty obvious to anyone who uses a social site. There’s a link to inbox and sent messages.

Now when I click on the profile info link something very interesting happens. Take a look:

You can see it automatically pulled my photo and it pulls the information you have filled in on your FB profile. This allows you to create this social profile in less than a minute because it’s already pulling your Facebook stuff.

As a user of social sites surely you can appreciate a speedy profile set up. This is very nice.

The favorites link is where you can add favorite photos, celebrities, obsessions. This link will probably be of little use to you.

Personal photos link is self-explanatory. It’ll allow you to upload photos from your computer.

The next tab ‘account info’ is also pretty self explanatory but I want to highlight a couple of things.

First off it doesn’t have your e-mail address. So the e-mail you used to sign up for your Facebook account is still secure and you won’t get any e-mails from theinsider. Unless of course you choose to give your e-mail to theinsider.

Before I got to the screen I I clicked on e-mail preferences and got a bit worried. And here’s why:

As you can see from this screenshot virtually all of the boxes are checked by default! I had nightmare visions of an absolute deluge of e-mail into my main address where I signed up with Facebook. Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about that because you won’t get any e-mails unless you enter your e-mail into theinsider.com website and confirm it.

So disaster averted.

The ‘content feed’ link is extremely interesting.

This is taken straight from the insider.com page:

“Here at The Insider, we like exposure. Exposing Britney’s underwear (or lack there of), exposing Brangelina’s baby bombshells… and now, we want to expose you!

If you have mastered the art of blogging, you can have instant access to The Insider’s gossip-hungry community of users. Just complete this form to automatically publish the content of your blog or RSS feed to the site.”

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the incredible possibilities for this content feed. Now obviously you may not have a blog in the celebrity gossip space and so entering your RSS into this site would be inappropriate.

But what about when Digg goes live with Facebook connect? What about when other sites like perhaps business.com, webMD.com, health.com, and some of the other big sites which are in your market go live with this content feed technology allowing your RSS to display on their extremely high traffic sites?

I’m extremely excited about the possibilities but of course you have to respect this power and only enter your RSS feeds into sites in the same market and topic as you. Don’t be a spammer.

Now when you click on the profile link as seen in this picture:

The cool thing is it brings in whatever your Facebook status is automatically. So this is just another place where you can get your messages out to people on an automated basis.

The final cool thing is the ‘online now’ section.

Obviously the extreme power of this should be self-evident. Once Facebook connect goes live on some of the big sites in your market, being able to see other users of those sites who are obviously targeted to your market will be very beneficial. You’ll have a much higher chance of getting them to accept your friend requests since you know they’re online right now.

And that wraps up the main functionality of this new software. It’s very exciting and I’m sure your head is spinning with ideas of your own on how you can capitalize on this.

A couple of things which came to my mind are:

–> when is Digg going to release this?

–> how is the war between Microsoft and Google for social domination going to play out?

–> what side of the fence are other big sites like eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, MySpace, and other big social news sites like Stumbleupon, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller going to land on?

Of course one of the biggest remaining wildcards is Yahoo. Will their ad serving deal with Google’s adwords have any affect on their decision-making for which platform to use either Google friend connect or Facebook Connect.

Having your massive friends list from Facebook or Google be portable so that you can have instant network leverage on big sites is going to be a huge timesaver and open up the Web.

Only time will tell but it seems like the first fledgling steps of Web 3.0 have begun…

Originally posted 2008-10-16 09:30:11. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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