Hilinsky Consulting Social Media Blog

Want to know what this f8 event was about? One word: simplification.

Facebook is making it easier for websites to implement their tools and to communicate with each other.

As you know, Facebook is huge and growing quickly. Currently there are over 400 million people interacting on Facebook, it’s fairly important that users can interact with brands while outside of their site, but also store that data to provide social recommendations and relevant information. Equally important, web developers who build the sites must be able to quickly and easily integrate these tools into their site seamlessly and without problems for them to remain active.

Open Graph API is essentially mapping how everyone is connected together and providing more social value by default. Facebook is going to make an effort to simplify the interaction between social networks specializing in certain niche markets: Yelp for small businesses, Pandora for music.. Facebook is working to piece together all these popular networks and to map and strengthen the connections, then to provide more relevant data or recommendations. In order to provide social value, all these sites must be able to communicate and share information easily.

The current problem is that right now most developers must hack together these streams which cause problems is anything between the stream interface is changed. It’s not easy integrating different APIs that are barely working on the same standard. The result of this is a high probability for a bad user experience due to API bugs and downtime.

Facebook wants to help resolve and simplify this issue.

The idea is that if we can pull all of these sites together (like Yelp and Pantora) to work together more seamlessly by creating a standard.. we can make a better web that is more relevant to users by instantly customizing to their preferences.

At f8 this morning, Facebook announced significant platform changes this morning which allows developers to better weave together other social networks and social objects that users interact with daily. It’s going to be easier to tie all these networks together using Facebooks tools, which is great news for social web developers.

Facebook’s focus is to allow developers to better enable their website socially by using less code. Many of the new tools and widgets Facebook provides are simply one line of HTML code with an iFrame tag, it’s very simple to integrate and takes out a lot of the time spent working with PHP code.

Facebook will be releasing new social plugins for web developers which they briefly previewed today:

- Like button: share information with one click (lowing friction and increasing sharing)
- Activity stream plugin: recent activity from the wall, displayed on your website.
- Recommendations plugin: finding content most relevant to user and recommending it
- Social bar: an ‘all in one’ bottom frame for your website to make it more social and easily integrate
- Social META information which can be added to your site that allows you to identify more about your band, brand or company.

Bottom line: Facebook wants to make the web social by default. The tools released today will help developers to accomplish this.. we’ll be posting more information on these tools and how they can benefit brands in the next few days as we learn more.

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