This post is syndicated from the SocialToo Blog – please check it out! I think this feature’s pretty cool:

Recently Facebook launched the ability for users to checkin to any place with their mobile phone, sharing with their Facebook friends where they are and what they’re doing, but what about their Twitter friends?  Services like FourSquare and Gowalla offer the ability for users to share their checkins to Twitter as well as Facebook (or just leave them on Gowalla or Foursquare).  Facebook, with the exception of Pages, has seemed reluctant to include Twitter syncing for Facebook status updates.  That is where SocialToo comes in.  Starting today, you can now sync your Facebook checkins automatically from Facebook to Twitter using SocialToo.

The feature is completely free for anyone on Twitter and Facebook. To enable the feature, just log in to SocialToo through your Twitter account, click “Settings”, and click “Associate a Facebook Account”. Once you have both a Twitter and Facebook account linked in SocialToo, go back to the “Inbox” tab, and check the box next to “Facebook to Twitter” in the upper-right. You can now check the boxes next to the things you want to share, including, “Autopost Places” to automatically post checkins from Facebook. Once checked, any new checkin you post on Facebook will now go to Twitter.

In addition to checkins, you can also automatically post links and status updates. Any checkin with a note attached will show the note as the text of the Tweet and a link back to the checkin on Facebook. To exclude the checkin from Twitter, just add a “-” after a space at the end of your note and it won’t go to Twitter. The same goes for status updates and links that you post to Facebook.  We are also considering the potential for an opt-in “+” in the future (let us know in the comments if this is interesting to you).

Hopefully some of you find this feature useful.  We think it’s a powerful way to let others know, now on both Twitter and Facebook, where you are and what you’re doing, and has the potential to generate some interesting conversation.  Let us know how you plan to use it!

More about SocialToo:

SocialToo provides features to complement the experience people, businesses, and brands, have on the social networks they participate on. We’re a utility providing tools to help automate the process of managing a brand image, while at the same time enabling users to clean up spammy messaging, track followers and friends, and manage those friends and followers in the process. Here are some of the features we provide:

• Auto Follow – follow back the people that follow you or your brand, providing potential discovery and networking opportunities, opening up communication channels, and giving those that follow you a sense of belonging in your community
  • Auto Follow is a one-time $10 fee.
• Automatic DM and Stream filtering – do you get spammy DMs on Twitter? We’ll delete them automatically for you. Set up simple filters with keywords in DMs you don’t want to receive, then set rules, such as “unfollow”, “delete”, or “ignore” to get rid of them. Turn off Twitter’s DM e-mails and turn on ours, and we’ll also respect your rules with the DM e-mails we send, meaning if you say “ignore”, we won’t send you the DMs that match your rules. In addition, you can filter out people that say certain things in your stream, or that Tweet from specific (and some times spammy) applications.
  • DM filtering is free up to 4 filters. Stream and Application filtering comes with the monthly SocialToo Premium plan. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
• Bulk Unfollow – need to start over on Twitter? Unfollow all the people you’ve ever followed at once. Set a whitelist under “Friends” and you can exclude specific people as you do so.
  • Bulk Unfollow on Twitter is a one-time $35 fee.
• SocialToo Stats – one of our most popular features, you get a daily e-mail with all the people that followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter. We try to organize them by the Tweets we detected at the time of the unfollow or follow. We also provide additional information about each person and the ability to unfollow or follow them straight from the e-mail. In addition, for our monthly Premium users we provide an organized interface, showing a timeline of all your new follows and unfollows in a graph, your number of Tweets, and if you click through to any day it will show you the new followers and unfollowers for that day at any point we’ve tracked, along with your Tweets for that day.
  • The daily stats e-mail is a one-time $20 fee. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
• SocialToo Surveys – a “Social” way of posting quick polls to your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Create a quick poll, and share it with your friends on multiple networks. Your friends can take the poll, share it with their friends, comment on it, or create their own!

FBML’s dead. I’m saying it right here (and yes, I wrote the book).  Facebook recently announced that they are moving away from FBML and more towards iFrame-based applications and Social Plugins for integration on your website and internal Facebook.com hosted applications.  Does this mean the Static FBML app is going away?  What will you be able to do in order to customize your Facebook presence both on and off Facebook with these newly announced changes?

On October 26 from 2:30pm to 3:30pm Pacific I’m going to be speaking at Mike Stelzner and Social Media Examiner‘s Facebook Success Summit.  The Summit is packed with superstars in the Facebook world such as InsideFacebook’s Justin Smith, Mari Smith, “the Pied Piper of Facebook”, ProBlogger‘s Darren Rowse, Brian Solis, author of “Engage”, Paul Dunay and others including major Brand managers for brands like Intel, Cisco, and Xbox (too bad we’re not on a panel – would be a good discussion).  All the speakers have real world experience making people very successful using Facebook as a major tool in their arsenal.

My topic is going to be “From Fishers to Farmers – Bringing Your Brand to Your Customers Using Social Technologies”.  I’ll be covering all the tools you need to both “Fish where the fish are”, and then bring those customers back to your brand by building “Your Farm” on your own turf.  We’ll discuss Social Plugins, custom tabs, and maybe even geek out a little with some new and interesting stuff you can do on your own website and on Facebook itself to integrate actual technology to empower you as a marketer.

I’m excited to present in October – judging on previous events by Social Media Examiner this will likely prove to be one of the highlights in Social Media-related conferences for you to attend.  I hope you can add this to your calendar and at a minimum come see me talk about some of the most important things you can do as a marketer, spoken by a true Geek who understands this stuff.  Check with the company you work for – it’s all virtual so there aren’t any travel or hotel costs to worry about.  It’s very worth your company’s time and money to send you to this.

You can sign up here, or on the link on the right of this blog.  I do get a commission on anybody who signs up through this site (I’m not getting paid for the conference), so please use these links and send others through here if you can.  Can’t wait to see you there!

Here’s a great video by Michael Stelzner, founder of the Conference, introducing the Conference:

As I’ve been writing Facebook Application Development for Dummies (now available on Amazon for pre-order!), there has been one thing I have been noticing: Despite all the new focus on Facebook’s Graph API, Facebook has still had a lot of conflicting focus on their old, more complicated, Connect APIs, making it a fun thing to try and explain in a Dummies book.  That confusion was evident especially in the application creation screens, where Facebook had page after page of options to fill out that they were no longer focusing on, “Widgets” to configure (which Facebook doesn’t even link to any more), and odd terminology that just doesn’t make sense any more.  Add to that the fact that, just announced, Facebook is killing the FBML versions of apps in favor of the iframe (and FBML itself in favor of Social Plugins), a lot of stuff just didn’t make sense in their app creation process any more.

Facebook's old application setup had 8 sections, and included confusing features like "Connect"

Some time recently it appears Facebook finally fixed that.  Now Facebook has just 5 categories to fill out when creating your application or Facebook-integrated website, and there are no confusing terms such as “Connect”, or “Widgets”, or “Canvas”.  Facebook is focusing on 5 things: “About”, “Website”, “Facebook Integration”, “Mobile”, and “Advanced”.  I think from the titles of the sections these things are obvious, and it also shows that Facebook is putting an increased focus on external use of their applications on websites and mobile and less on Facebook itself.  We also see this with the removal of custom tabs on personal profiles (they will still be available for your business Page, have no fear!).  In addition, Facebook has removed the long Application key, and is now putting focus on just the Application ID and Application Secret – this is a move they have been pushing towards since the launch of Graph API at their F8 developers conference earlier in the year.

The new Facebook Application Screen is simpler and easier than the old

In addition, Facebook has added 3 experimental new features you can turn on, to focus more on their new OAuth 2.0 authentication process.  One of my biggest frustrations in trying to document all of this in my book has been the lack of consistency.  Getting graph API to handle authentication on a Facebook.com-hosted app in the past has been a horrendous experience, pretty much forcing developers back to the old way of authorization.  Now it should be easier for developers to fully focus on the new Graph API methods, both in and out of Facebook.  It is completely clear that Graph API is the future, and Social Plugins are replacing FBML (unfortunately for my second book).

Facebook also added 3 new features, making OAuth 2.0 easier to manage on Canvas pages.

While frustrating as I try to adapt my book, these changes are welcome, and should make creation and configuration of apps much easier for developers in the future.  Especially with the future removal of the need to configure FBML or iFrame, along with Profile tabs, setting up an application should be a piece of cake for both novices and experienced developers alike.  I’m sure it also makes the support process for Facebook a lot easier as well.

I hope other app platforms can take Facebook’s lead on their API.  Out of all of them, Facebook’s new focus is dirt simple and easy for the most novice of programmers to learn.

Are you working on a Facebook app?  How does this affect your development on Facebook platform?

In the last few weeks Facebook has been slowly rolling out a feature that, while not exactly new in concept, I think gives businesses and brands another opportunity to think strategy surrounding their Facebook efforts.  The feature is Facebook Questions.  The feature is pretty much a re-release of Facebook Polls (see my previous article on InsideFacebook.com in 2008 where I discussed this as a business tool), with even greater viral potential.  In fact, it makes even more sense today than ever, with the increased focus on Facebook Pages, something Facebook has chosen to focus on with the new Questions feature.

Facebook Questions, in many ways is like my SocialToo Surveys, with a pure Facebook focus (on SocialToo we have Twitter and Facebook integration, with more Social Networks coming soon), and the ability to completely take the poll out of the question (no pun intended).  Facebook Questions focus on one question that the user can ask to his or her friends, and those friends can answer anything they want to (something you can do in SocialToo’s comments for each SocialToo Survey).  The difference is that on Facebook you can vote up or down each answer, and the most popular answers get pitted at the top in a more prominent position.  This puts it at more of a competing stance with Yahoo Answers, or Quora, or Aardvark.

With each Facebook Question, the person asking can also add a poll, allowing other Facebook users to answer a set of pre-defined answers, allowing the person asking to see what the most popular of his or her own answers might be.  All this while allowing users to also add their own answers and vote those up or down.  I admit, it’s a pretty cool implementation, and something I’ve long wanted to do with SocialToo Surveys (and hopefully we will).

Here’s where you should get involved with your brand though.  With each Question, the person asking can assign “Topics” to the Question.  Each “Topic” is essentially just a Facebook Page somewhere.  It can be any Facebook Page, and doesn’t even have to be one the person asking has even liked or administers.  Assigning a Question to a Topic ensures that the Question has the potential of appearing in the list of Questions on the side of other users’ News Stream who have “liked” the Pages listed in the Question.  So, in essence, you have the potential for a targeted, free, Facebook Ad if the Question is pitted right (albeit with much fewer customized options for targeting).

Businesses and brands ought to be taking advantage of this.  Ask interesting questions to engage your audience, and tag Pages you think have people that might be interested in that question and your brand.  Keep in mind though that Facebook currently has no way to moderate (or delete) the answers to the Questions you ask, so be prepared if a Question happens to turn against you.  You can create Facebook Questions as an individual user, or as a Facebook Page.

In addition to asking and essentially tagging specific audiences with your Questions, there is another great strategy surrounding answers that you can utilize.  I actually saw this with Facebook’s own “Facebook Pages” Page on Facebook.  A user asked a question about Facebook Pages, and “Facebook Pages” answered the question for that user.  I’m sure this brought more attention to that Facebook Page, and the user was even more satisfied as a result.  Not only that, but future users will be able to see the “official” answer from Facebook on the issue.  In a way, this also makes Facebook Questions a competitor to GetSatisfaction, as it can be a great Support Channel for your brand.

I wanted to know how Facebook did this, so I asked my own Question on Facebook.  Damien Basille quickly answered with the following: “You must be an admin of the Facebook Page you want to answer as. Then, next to the Publish Answer blue button it will say “as [First name Last name] (change)”. Click on the (change) link and you will be able to answer as any of your FB Pages that you change to.”

So, with a simple click of the “change” link I’m now posting as my own Facebook Page, answering Questions all around Facebook about my brand.  I think that’s pretty useful!

If you’re a brand, you should be carefully looking at Facebook Questions and figuring out a good way to integrate this great tool into your current Facebook Strategy.  We can only hope that we’re given even more flexibility in the future to access these questions via an API.  Hopefully a search API is provided, and we’ll start to see tools allowing brands and others to easily search and find people asking relevant Questions on Facebook.

If you’re not yet seeing the “Ask a Question” link in your status update box at the top of your news stream, have no fear – it will be there soon, as Facebook slowly rolls out this feature.  This is something all brands should be looking at right now.

You can learn more about Facebook Questions at http://facebook.com/questions.

Social Media Examiner shared some advice I gave on their Facebook Page recently regarding the warning about Facebook “boxes” being removed from Facebook Pages in the next week.  The reminder was met with a lot of concern from subscribers, who had grown attached to the ability to customize the look and feel of their Facebook Pages through the Static FBML app on Facebook and the ability to add custom “boxes” to the Wall of their Page.  The other concern is that Facebook will also be switching to the smaller, 520px Tab format, reducing the amount of surface area for a custom tab to add personalization to a Facebook Page.  I argue all this concern is moot however – there is something better Page owners can be doing that they aren’t, and that is moving their Pages over to their own websites and managing the interface there instead of on Facebook.com, and I think that’s the direction Facebook wants Page owners to go.

At Facebook’s sold out F8 developer conference this year this focus seemed evident.  Facebook launched a series of new “Social Plugins”, and a protocol (called Open Graph Protocol) enabling any website to essentially become a “Facebook Page”.  Right off, website owners could simply put a “like button” Social Plugin on their website by copying and pasting an iframe tag from Facebook’s developer site, and immediately, with some added meta tags added to the <head> section of their HTML, they could have all the functionality of a Facebook Page right on their own website.

Facebook had a great demo at the conference, which Jolie O’Dell (from Mashable) pointed me to (see her article about it here), where they basically took all the content from Lady Gaga’s Page and converted it to its own, customized website with its own look and feel that you could easily change themes.  Facebook-me.com, which appears to still be there, enabled customized themes to be applied to profiles, perhaps similar to MySpace in a way, but in a way that website owners themselves could host those themes on their own servers.  All this could be done through simple Graph API calls and some customization on your own server.  See their demo they gave me here:

For instance, if you query http://graph.facebook.com/stay/feed in your browser, immediately you’ll be presented with a parseable feed taken straight from my Facebook Page of all the posts put there.  Re-format that in any way you like and you have your own customized Facebook Page.  No login necessary.

It can be even better though.  Rather than letting Facebook host the data, you can handle most of it on your own through Social Plugins.  For instance, let’s look at what happens if I want to make StayNAlive.com its own Facebook Page (in fact I’ll do it right here so you can try it out when I’m finished).  I simply go to http://developers.facebook.com and click on the big green “Add Facebook to my Site” button, then click on the Social Plugins link.  Select the “Like Button” social plugin, and enter http://staynalive.com in the URL box.  Click the “Get Code” button, and you’ll be given code that looks like this:

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fstaynalive.com&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80″ scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:80px;” allowTransparency=”true”></iframe>

Now, if I put that at the top of the website, a like button appears, and my website is now a Facebook Page.  Go ahead and click “like” and you’ll see what I mean.  Now you’re subscribed to my “Page”, you’ll get all the posts I send to your news feed, and best of all, any links to the “Page” go back to my actual website, and not Facebook.com.

Becoming an Admin

To get all the benefits of turning your website into a Page and having the full flexibility of customization, you’ll need to make a couple updates to the <head> section of your site’s HTML.  These meta tags follow a standard called “Open Graph Protocol”, and by following it, Facebook will know how to represent your site inside Facebook.  There are different tags that can specify the title of your site, a main image for your site, and more, but the most important tag you need to add to your site’s <head> section is a meta tag that looks like this:

<meta property=”fb:admins” content=”683545112″ />

This specific meta tag identifies the user, 683545112 (which happens to be my Facebook ID), as the admin for your website on Facebook.  To get your Facebook ID, the best way I use is to go to your profile, click on your profile image, and look at the number after “id=” in the URL.  That’s your Facebook ID.  You can also specify multiple Facebook IDs in the content attribute of the meta tag by separating them by commas.

Once you specify this, next to your like button that you just installed you’ll see a “Admin Page” link next to the like button that, by clicking on the link, will take you to what looks like a regular Facebook Page on Facebook.  It’s from there you can post updates to your fans and have them see it in their news feed.  Also, once you’re identified as an admin, any link to the Facebook Page in your own Feed will link back to that admin interface on Facebook.com. (not to the website itself, which is what all other users will see)

For other meta tag identifiers you can use, view the source of this website and look in the <head> section – look for the “og:” meta tags.  You can also read more about it in the developer documentation here.

The Feed

By using this method, you get all the benefits of any normal Facebook Page on Facebook.com.  You just have to install the proper Facebook Social Plugins to get what you want.  For instance, if you want your visitors to see a feed of all items you’ve posted to the feed, install the “Like Box” social plugin, and enter the ID of the Facebook Page you just set up. (to get the ID, go to the “Admin Page” link next to your like button, and it’s the long number in the URL)  Look over on the right of this website to see an example of the Like Box feed.

As mentioned above, you can also post items to your feed.  Click “Edit Page” on your admin Page, and you can set up an RSS feed to import notes into your feed.  I can also post videos, pictures, or anything else, just as I would a normal Facebook Page hosted on Facebook.com.

Importing Your Blog Posts

You’ll notice the “Like Box” on the right that has all the posts from this blog on it.  That’s because I’m importing the RSS for this blog and now ever time a new post goes out all the people that have “Liked” StayNAlive.com via the link above will get all the posts I submit via this blog.  This can be a great alternative to allowing users to subscribe via RSS.

So there you have it – any need to customize a Facebook.com-hosted Page is now moot.  We don’t need them any more.  I see no reason for hosting on Facebook itself if you need full customization.  In fact, all links your visitors see in Facebook will now point back to your own website and not Facebook.com.  When the user likes your website it will now appear in their interests and link back to your website.  That can be good for SEO.  Search results will link back to your website, and hints will show up for all your visitors’ friends, pointing them back to your website.

This, IMO is the ideal way to set up a Facebook Page now.  The Facebook Page hosted on Facebook.com is not the future.  Your website is the future, and Facebook has made it completely possible for you to own this experience.

Are there any reasons you can think of not to use this method?  What other tips do you have?  I’d like to hear them in the comments and I’ll update this post as it makes sense.

If you ask which State is biggest on Facebook, at least if you ask a Texan, the winner would be Texas. Today at about 11:30pm Central, the Facebook Page, “I bet Texas can get 1 million fans before any other state.” did just what it set out to do – it became the first Facebook Page for a State to get 1 million fans on Facebook.

The Page went up against Pages like “I bet Alaska can get 1 million fans before any other state.”, and “I bet New York can get 1 million fans before any other state.”  Texas was the clear winner.  The biggest one I could find was New York, with only about 200,000 fans.  Looking through AllFacebook’s Page rankings, there were no State pages above Texas.

The enthusiasm for the state is evident.  The accomplishment was met with comments like, “cool now can winter come?????? lol”, “YEP CUZ TEXAS IS THE BESTEST!”, “Lets go for 2 million now!”, and “i think that texas should just be its own country”.  You may even see some of your friends partying and waving their Texas flags and holding up horn signs tonight as a result.

It’s hard to tell if any other state really tried, but if you’re a proud Texan like myself, tonight is a glorious occasion.  We have dominated all y’all!  Let’s go light a bonfire, say the pledge, eat some jalapenos, and cook some brisket!  I’ll be hanging my Texas flag proudly tomorrow.  And starting today we can all join this man in understanding our state’s bird, tree, reptile, and yes, now the official Texas Facebook Page which is way better and bigger than y’all’s:

Don’t Mess With Texas.

What’s a lot for one site may be miniscule for another.  Recently, Facebook announced they were removing the ability for developers to write custom Publisher boxes “due to low usage” of the feature on the site.  The feature, which enabled any application to customize the publishing experience for users, was a little-known, and little-advertised feature known to produce a good amount of traffic for applications.  It was a successful feature though, and perhaps “best-kept secret” for many developers writing for Facebook Platform.  Shortly after it launched I remember a few developers writing about how just a few tweaks to the custom Publisher and adapting the experience to each user provided tremendous conversion in application adds for users.  I was sold.

On SocialToo, one significant tool we provided was the ability to, using the custom Publisher (which is still working now, until Facebook turns it off), allow Facebook users to publish to any Twitter profile, and any Page they administer, just with a few checkboxes attached to the Publisher box at the top of Facebook.  This way users with a preference towards Facebook (which, despite the popularity of Twitter in the blogging world, is very popular amongst marketers) could easily publish to their multiple accounts on a selective basis straight from their Facebook profile.

This was a huge success for me on SocialToo – so much that despite the majority of our features being Twitter-focused, this one small feature was bringing in a significant amount of conversions for me.  Users would authorize the SocialToo app, get the publishing feature, and at the same time learn about the other tools we provided for Twitter and elsewhere on SocialToo, purchasing our premium features straight from Facebook.  20% of my traffic came from Facebook as a result.  Near 15,000 of my 70,000+ users were using the application.

Yet, according to Facebook’s response on a developer forum post, they seem to be looking at mostly usage of the Publisher, not net-effect towards conversion (which is why developers were using the publisher – it was an advertising tool for their apps).  According to Facebook:

“We understand that the publisher feature was successfully used by some developers and enjoyed by users.  While it’s never easy to have a feature removed, we made this decision only after carefully reviewing the feature’s usage over time. For the sake of transparency, here are some basic usage stats that illustrate the approximate daily usage:
-          47 applications with more than 1000 stream publishes
-          10 applications with more than 10K stream publishes
-          0 applications with more than 100K stream publishes”

Usage of the publisher, number of publishes, etc. is an important factor, but Facebook still seems to be neglecting what those 10,000+ stream publishes per day were producing for those developers in terms of monetary value and overall conversions.  For my application, it was priceless.

I’m disappointed that Facebook is killing this feature.  I’m disappointed that they did it with such short notice and without it being on the roadmap they revealed at the end of 2009.  Yes, the numbers, according to Facebook, are small, but with only one document tucked away on the developers wiki devoted towards the subject can you blame it for being such a non-used feature?  From my own experience, the conversions alone it produced, and the utility it provided were enough to make it well worth the integration, and I promoted it to all my clients.

If usage was so low, it certainly wasn’t because it wasn’t useful or valuable.  It was because Facebook didn’t promote it or show the usefulness well enough.  Perhaps the API for it was too complicated – I don’t know.  I do know this is one of the many Facebook Platform features that have gone away that will be sorely missed.

I think one thing with Facebook Platform we can now be sure of is that while Facebook continues to increase usefulness of their platform on the web, their own website’s platform on apps.facebook.com is slowly being removed, piece by piece.  If this is the case I really wish they would put that on their roadmap.  As for the custom Publisher – this developer is drastically effected by its removal.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is no stranger to technology.  With several of the web’s most traffic’d websites, a very popular Youtube Channel (MormonMessages), one of the top Facebook Pages, and a great host of mobile applications enabling members to read scriptures and listen to talks from leaders wherever they are, there’s no doubt the Church knows what it’s doing.  One of the big efforts the Church has built is its Facebook presence on its official Pages.   Today, the Church’s official Page surpassed 300,000 likes and growing on Facebook.

Currently the Church has Pages for its Mormon Messages (53,000 likes), the Church’s Family History Library (3,300 likes),  and even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (46,000 likes).  The Church’s main, official account, http://facebook.com/LDS, serves to be an outlet for the highlights of each of the Pages and other announcements for the Church to its members.  The Church keeps its Page regularly updated with interesting items for its members.

The LDS Church has a worldwide membership of over 13 million members.  Those members speak over 90 languages, and the Church broadcasts its message out to each of those twice a year in its Semi-annual General Conference held in Salt Lake City, Utah every year.  With such a broad audience, it’s important for the Church to have an outlet to enable members to access that content, and find useful messages they can then bring back to their local areas and congregations.  In addition, Facebook enables a great way for members to share information and inspiring messages from the Church with their friends.

It’s rare you see much word on the use of Facebook in a religious setting, but it makes complete sense in regards to virally spreading a message around the world.  I’m very excited to see these messages spread, and if anything, this can be an interesting thing to watch if you’re a faith-based organization looking to get word out to your members in creative ways.

Mormon or not, if you want a refresher to your day and enjoy inspiring messages to lift up your day, be sure to like the page at http://facebook.com/LDS. (oh, and don’t forget to click “like” on this article)

Disclosure: In my day job, I am currently working as the Social Media Architect for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While they are currently my employer, this article by no means represents any official announcement, declaration, proclamation, or doctrine on behalf of the Church.  All claims or topics written are solely my own opinion and not the opinions or official word of the LDS Church.  To be clear, regardless of my day job, I am still a member of the Church and I still believe its teachings and will always have beliefs to share surrounding the Church and its teachings.  What I write here should be considered as such.

A post to Facebook by Ryan Merket (former Facebook employee, founder of Ping.fm, and now founder of Appbistro) inspired me to check out a new Facebook App by Zach Allia that lets you “dislike” any website on the internet.  The app is simple – you add a little bookmarklet to your browser and connect it with Facebook.  Now any website you visit you can “dislike”, and your dislike appears on your Facebook Wall for all your friends to see.

Merket and I had a little fun with the app.  He would dislike one political figure’s Facebook Page, and I would then go and dislike the opposite political figure.  Or, he would dislike something and I would go “like” his recent dislike.  I even went to one of his dislikes, clicked the permalink for the dislike, and disliked his dislike!  (Have a headache yet?)

The app doesn’t just work on Facebook.  You can go to any website on the internet and click the little “Dislike” bookmarklet and your dislike will appear.  In addition, you can go to http://likebutton.me and get a similar like bookmarklet to like things on the internet in a similar manner.

This is a totally cool idea, and great example of the simplicity of Facebook Graph API.  I predict it will be very popular due to Facebook and other sites’ lack of a “dislike” button for the network.  I hope he can find a good way to monetize the concept.  In a recent environment of negativity on the internet, this app could just provide a little level of fun and positivity to Facebook.  ”dislike” is the new “poke”.

Check out, and “like” the app at http://dislikebutton.me/

Do you “like” the concept?

I spoke earlier how I didn’t buy the claims against Mark Zuckerberg trying to steal away our privacy and con people into becoming more public if they didn’t chose to do so. Today Facebook made that even more clear in a press conference I attended by phone by stating their intentions, and introducing an even newer, more simplified, more granular privacy control model that launches today.

The new settings enable, via simple controls, for users to chose at a high level whether they just want friends to see their data, whether they want friends of friends to see their data, or whether they want to customize that data at a piece-by-piece level.  Users that set this will then default to this setting with any new feature Facebook releases in the future, making users able to be confident their privacy will not change.  In addition, Facebook is enabling users to opt out of the “Instant Personalization” settings completely.  Instant Personalization enables third party websites that have partnered with Facebook to, with the user’s ability to opt out, collect user information with the intent to make the experience for that user more personalized and more relevant on each site that implements these controls.  Users will be able to opt out of this completely, and also set granular controls as to how applications have control over their privacy.  Users will also be able to control how people see them in the Facebook search and directory much better with the new settings.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and founder, had a sincere tone at the press conference, wanting to be absolute sure they had no ill will, nor intentions to sell user data to advertisers, or disrespect user privacy in the process.  He was very clear that along with allowing people and helping them to be more open and share better, Facebook held the same priority towards enabling users to have complete control over how public, or private that data was as they used the site.  He admitted they rushed to launch their previous features and hoped that this new round of more simplified settings made it easier to understand what users were getting into, and at the same time allowed them to set specific settings to their comfort level on the site.

I think Facebook laid down to rest any concerns users have had about privacy.  They showed their hand, and, while a Full House at Facebook, I think those that just quit Facebook over privacy will be forced to fold.

Facebook will be gradually rolling out the new settings to all users starting today.  If you’re in Utah, be sure to watch Fox 13 KSTU at 5:30pm and 9pm (you can watch online here) for more as I discuss these new settings with Nineveh Dinha.  I’ll try to post those videos later.  See screenshots of the new settings below: