Most guys (and girls) who love Facebook like I do probably have a Facebook Page where those wanting to get a scoop of the latest in our professional lives can come learn, chat, and converse with each other.  I consider a Facebook Page (some call them “Fan Pages”) the equivalent on Facebook to a Twitter Profile, as it enables a public, anonymous way to express yourself without limit to the number of people that “follow” you.  Pages are powerful, and can build strong engagement for you and your brand in ways Twitter or even a regular Facebook Profile can’t.  I was surprised that with all the little “chicklets” out there displaying anywhere from the number of readers on your blog to the number of followers you have on Twitter that there wasn’t anything for blog owners to display the number of Fans they have on Facebook. That’s why I created the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet for WordPress blogs.

The premise of the chicklet is simple.  It uses Facebook Connect (something I argue is even more powerful than a Facebook Page, but requires someone with at least HTML and Javascript knowledge to implement) to go out and get the number of fans for a Facebook Page you specify, and share the number of those fans right on your blog.  In addition, it hyperlinks the chicklet back to your Facebook Page.  Displaying this chicklet on your blog can be a great way to encourage readers to click through and become fans on Facebook as well, where more conversations can take place and your blog can spread even further.  You can see the Facebook Chicklet for this blog up above this article next to the subscribers and twitter followers chicklets.  Go ahead and click on it and become a fan and I’ll send you more updates!

Implementation

To implement the chicklet, you’ll first need to download the FBFoundations plugin (download here) that I wrote and can be downloaded here.  This just makes it so that it can access Facebook to get the number of Fans for your Page.  It will also add an additional meta tag or two to make sharing your blog a little prettier when it’s shared on Facebook.

Once you’ve downloaded and activated FBFoundations on your blog, just download the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet plugin, extract it into your WordPress plugins directory, and activate it.  You’ll then want to configure it to point to your Facebook Page in your blog’s admin (if not, it will point to mine!).  Now, go to either the sidebar widgets section in your administration if your blog is widgets-enabled, or go into your Blog’s theme files, and place the following code anywhere you want the chicklet to show up:

<?php if (function_exists(‘fbchicklet_button’)) echo fbchicklet_button(); ?>

Once that’s in and the plugin is activated, the chicklet should start showing with the number of Fans on your Facebook Page.  It’s that simple.

Again, be sure to enable the FBFoundations plugin on your blog for this to work.  Also, if you want to also enable sharing for each blog post on your blog to Facebook, along with the number of people that have shared the post, be sure to also check out my FBShare plugin for WordPress!

I guess this is kind of my Christmas present to you all.  Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy Chanukah this season!

You can download the plugin straight from WordPress right here.  Here is the WordPress plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fbfoundations-facebook-chicklet/

Image Courtesy Robb Sutton from http://robbsutton.com/micro-blogging-are-facebook-and-twitter-replacing-personal-blogs/

You asked for it, you got it.  My FBFoundations WordPress plugin for Facebook Connect was built to provide you the basic building blocks to create your own Facebook Connect-compatible blog.  The idea being you add the foundations, and then plugin developers can add their own compatible plugins on top of that with little to no additional effort.  The first version was a little rough – it required you to have a popup login button the first 3 times a user visited your site (unless they logged in), wasn’t very compatible with 3rd-party comment systems like Disqus, and required some additional effort.  It was a pain for me as well.

Today I’m releasing a new version, version 0.4, which has the following updates:

• The popup login is now optional, and off by default
• There is a new Facebook login button that appears in the sidebar if the user is not logged in.  This is in addition to the one above the comments box.
• You no longer have to have a specific div with an id of “#commentform” to load the login button for your users
• Better support for jquery – since jquery’s built into the latest versions of WordPress, I now load that instead.
• Meta support! Now, any blog that implements the FBFoundations plugin will automatically have the correct meta tags to properly format Facebook shares back to Facebook.  On each single post, the post’s title and excerpt are loaded correctly in the share to Facebook.  If the post has an image, the first image of the post appears with the share as well, instead of forcing you to surf through an endless list of images.  It just works.

In addition to the above features, you get the existing features which include:

• Pre-loading of Facebook Javascript client libraries
• XFBML support out of the box – you should now be able to include XFBML anywhere in your blog, in blog posts, etc.
• Automatic authentication and authorization of Facebook users

Now your job is to go create something.  Once you install this on your blog you now have a virtual playground for which you can start using the Facebook APIs via Javascript or PHP.  You can add some XFBML and do a friend invite form, for example, or maybe replace your comments with an fb:comments XFBML tag.  Or maybe you want to get more advanced and start loading some friends via the API and friends.getAppUsers.  I’m now going to go and have some fun with my FBShare plugin.

For more information, be sure to check out the official FB Foundations post (which I’m going to update with this post).  The download with all the updates mentioned here is version 0.4.  You can download it by clicking or copying this link.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions, bugs, or improvements.  I also welcome any patches – this is 100% GPL’d code!

Here’s the link again: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fbfoundations-facebook-connect-plugin.zip

One of my biggest frustrations in adapting Facebook Connect into WordPress blogging has been the fact that most plugins out there either have too much, or too little incorporated into them.  When you add more than one, you end up calling the Facebook Javascript Client libraries more than once, and often reinvent the wheel for what other people have done.  I mentioned this in a wish-list I posted earlier.  I want building blocks – I should be able to add a foundation, and add basic building blocks on top of that foundation to get what I want out of Facebook Connect on my blog.

Today I’m giving you that foundation.  I’ve written a WordPress plugin called FBFoundations which sets up the bare-bones necessities of any Facebook Connect install.  Once you have installed this plugin, the user can log in, and you have access to their login credentials from then forward to do whatever you want with. It’s a foundation – something to build a house on top of, and my hope is that many more FBFoundations-compatible plugins can emerge from this.

For instance, my next step will be to create a simple plugin for WordPress that uses the stream.publish API to post your blog to Facebook, and enable others to do so (tracking the number of comments and likes along the way if possible).  There will be no need to add a user log in to that process, nor do I have to load the XFBML init scripts to render XFBML.  It will all have already been loaded for me.

The script works a lot like Richard Miller’s “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin from a UI perspective.  At a default (you can configure this in your preferences) the first 3 times a user visits your blog they will be presented with a popup dialog box encouraging them to connect with Facebook.  After those 3 times the popup no longer appears.  There will also always be a “Connect with Facebook” login button above your comments (assuming they’re wrapped in a #commentform div) that will appear until the user clicks on it and logs in.

Using this plugin encourages each reader to log in through Facebook (remember – there are over 300 million Facebook users.  Chances are most of your readers are on Facebook), and enables you to do cool stuff with each of those readers.  Hopefully this will inspire others to make other FBFoundations-compatible plugins so we’re not re-inventing the wheel any more.  Stay tuned for more plugins from me – what will you build with this as your foundation?

You can download the plugin here.  Just download it and unzip it into your plugins directory in WordPress, activate it, and then add the API key for your website.  (You’ll need to go to http://developers.facebook.com to add the developer app and add an app for your website if you haven’t done so already)

Or click here to download:

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fbfoundations-facebook-connect-plugin.zip

Please let me know in the comments if you see any issues.  This is 100% GPL so please make your own adjustments and let me know if I can fix mine!

UPDATE – v0.4 – 10/26/2009: The popup is no longer default and can be turned on/off. Also added meta tag support and better compatibility with 3rd-party comment systems.  See this blog post for more info on 0.4.

Here are some screenshots:

A few of the Automattic developers are announcing a new beta program for WordPress.com blogs in which blog owners can enable Intense-debate and Disqus-style e-mail replies to comments on a blog (this blog uses Disqus comments). Such an announcement comes on the heels of Automattic’s purchase of Intense-debate, and according to Joseph Scott (one of the developers), the feature was actually co-written by one of the Intense-debate developers, Jon Fox.

According to the various posts, soon users will be able to comment on WordPress.com blogs, and when they comment, the blog owner will receive notice of the comment via e-mail. The blog owner can then respond straight from the e-mail without having to go back to the website to comment.

This integration seems to be just the first step of Automattic integrating with Intense-Debate. Other competitors that provide similar offerings are Disqus, and JS-Kit. Disqus doesn’t seem to be worried however, claiming that only 5% of Disqus blogs are based on WordPress (I personally, am a big fan of Disqus). Such a unified effort should worry the competitors however – where so many blog owners are now seamlessly integrated into a hosted commenting solution, every reader of those blogs will now also be required to integrate. It will be interesting to see what the response from the competition will be.

The beta is for WordPress.com users only. No word on if self-hosted blogs such as Stay N’ Alive will be provided an update.

I just upgraded to WordPress MU – testing the MediaRSS support. For the most part, you can ignore this.

Joseph Scott, developer at Automattic, posted that WordPress.com has recently broken 4 million total blogs. He further mentions that it took just 4 months to go from 3 million to 4 million. Assuming the rate isn’t exponential, it will just be end of December when they hit 5 million blogs. What would be even more fascinating is to know how many self-hosted blogs on WordPress are currently running. (This blog is a WordPress MU install)

WordPress seems to be no Facebook, but perhaps as projects like BuddyPress take off and people begin to virally create blogs and content with their friends it will get to that level. Where WordPress still has left to compete is with microblogging sites like Twitter – perhaps, with the large user base that they currently have we could see this happen in the near future.

There are rumors that Facebook has been working on their own WordPress plugin for Facebook. This is troubling for those of us developers that are developing for Facebook Connect, as it shows that Facebook could in one sweep, wipe any developer writing for the Facebook Connect platform out without any advanced notice. It only appeared that in the past, this type of thing only happened on the Facebook website itself, as Facebook has a right to, but I’ve seen it myself with my own development on Facebook Connect today.

Fair enough. I like competition, although I’d love this to be a community effort. So, since we know Facebook is working on their own WordPress plugin for Facebook, and we know Facebook isn’t willing to divulge their code yet. Since I’ve already devoted 20 or so of my own hours to the exact same project with no knowledge from Facebook, and am just now learning that Facebook was working on this behind the scenes incognito with no involvement from the community, I’d like to release my own plugin to the public, under the GPL v2.0 today, in the hopes the public can help with development and further building of this plugin, as a community, not just under Facebook’s roof.

It’s very troubling to see Facebook develop on external apps outside of Facebook like this – it only shows that Facebook is not afraid to encroach on other developers’ projects and that any one of us is at risk of having a useful project, our time and effort (I had no intentions on making money from this), wiped out in an instant. Sure, Facebook has every right to compete, but the least courtesy of notifying developers it already knows would be competition. With such a WordPress plugin this also encroaches on Six Apart’s announced integration with Facebook Connect, and puts Facebook in direct competition with Six Apart instead of making it Automattic’s problem.

It’s my sincere hope that Facebook decides not to continue such projects internally, but instead contributes to existing projects if they must do so. Facebook should in no way be competing with the developers that use their platform without warning, or risk us not being willing to contribute such things in the future. Let’s work together on this Facebook – how about a “we need help” board, or an “internal projects” board so we can know what you’re working on in advance. In this way we can work with you instead of parallel to you and hours spent doing so won’t be wasted. Or how about a little nudge to people like Six Apart saying, “we may just have to compete with you on this in the future” so their own time isn’t wasted with the integration.

Why should I keep building external web apps that integrate and send users to Facebook if Facebook is just going to replace my web apps in the end anyway?

So, I’m going to release my code here right now in hopes we can make this a community project – it requires you to set up your own app for your blog under the Facebook Developers site (just set your callback URL to your own website’s URL), and you must take your application key and enter it into the admin section. Only developers of the Facebook app itself can login through Facebook Connect until Facebook launches (one more advantage Facebook has over us developers – they know when they are launching, and therefore know how much time they have to develop these things, another reason to leave it to us developers in order to keep it fair). To install on your blog after doing so, just unzip the folder in your plugins folder, and activate your plugin under the plugins section in WordPress. After that, any Facebook user will be able to leave comments, under their own authentication, Facebook avatar, and name without having to re-enter it each time. We’ll be integrating this more in the future – if you can help please let me know! My project is a community project, not owned by Facebook, completely owned by me and you for the benefit of the community.

You can download it here.

You can see it in action on my test site, http://socialmediacast.staynalive.com – check out the Hello World post to see the existing comments. Note you will not be able to log in to Facebook Connect on that site because you are not a developer on the app for that site.

Now, I know I ranted a bit – it’s late, but I hope this makes some sort of sense. Am I out of line here? Should I just scrap my code completely and let Facebook do this? Is it a wise move for Facebook to keep making external apps like this that integrate with Facebook? What’s the best way for Facebook to approach this? I welcome your comments below.

I’ve been contemplating for awhile now a good way to share what I know about Social Software Development and helping business owners, marketers, and developers learn how to set up their own social apps. Especially for developers, I know there are many out there looking for howtos and ways to learn more about starting their own App, promoting it, and getting it off the ground. As the author of FBML Essentials, I feel I am well suited for the task so in the next few days I’m going to start doing howtos and overviews on how you can get your own Apps together. If you’re “the business type”, I may get a little technical on you, but I do recommend you keep watching and forward these onto your IT personell – your CIO, CTO, and the like should read these so they can learn what’s possible to integrate into your existing environments. I’ll also try to throw in a little goodie here and there for “the business type”.

So, I’ve created a new category to the right, “Social Coding” – if you want to track just that, click on the category name and add it to your RSS. I’ve also started a new FriendFeed Room where those involved or that want to get involved in Social Coding can discuss, learn, and talk with each other. You can subscribe to that here.

Let’s start by going over the types of sites I could cover. Here are just a few – let me know if you have a particular interest in learning about how to code for any one in particular:

• Facebook
• OpenSocial
• Google Friend Connect
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Pligg
• Digg
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• WordPress
• MoveableType
• Google App Engine
• Bungee Connect

Stay tuned! I’ll keep posting news and other rants as we go forward – I’ll just be adding in some good howtos at the same time. Oh, and if you’re a developer and would like to do a howto in your preferred language for us, contact me – I’d love to let you do a guest post.

Matt Mullenweg, a fellow Houstonian and all around cool guy spoke to us today at Web 2.0 Expo about WordPress’s present and future. Some features from the talk:

WordPress has 2 main products, Akismet, and WordPress.com. Akismet is solving many of the Spam problems Matt Cutts from Google talked about earlier, and WordPress.com handles much of the “Software as a Service” suggestion Matt Cutts gave.

WordPress.com has had a tremendous Growth. At their start, they had just 2 million uniques. This year, WordPress.com is at 168 million unique visitors, all with only 20 employees.

Some featured WordPress.com blogs that Matt Mullenweg likes:

• NY Times
• Flickr Blog
• Fail blog
• I can haz cheeseburger

99.999% of WordPress.com blogs get less than 10k pages/day. They are all on a different model.

Matt had some great announcements. He mentioned that 40-45% of their traffic is going to permalink pages. Therefore they are introducing a new feature they call “(Possibly) Related Posts”. With this, WordPress.com lists relevent links below each blog post, the first being links from your blog. Secondly, posts from the 300 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com are displayed, then mainstream news sites are displayed – these are all opt-out. Matt mentioned they partnered and worked with the company Sphere to do this.

The coolest announcement of Matt’s was the announcement of a new theme called Monotone. Monotone automatically adapts its color scheme to the photos uploaded to to WordPress. The idea is to adapt changes to the look and feel of your website based on what you’re doing, and every page changes as you move through the site – it was actually quite beautiful, and knowing that Matt is a very good Photographer I expect to see some cool things from that theme. I’m told Monotone will be released some time soon.

I mentioned this at the Hackathon in March, but have not had the time to blog about it yet. Thus far all announcements for the Utah Social Media Developers Garage Meetings and Utah Facebook Developers Garage Meetings have been announced either through this blog, or our Facebook Group. I’ve now created a Google Group for us at http://groups.google.com/group/utsmdev. Please sign up there and I’ll issue all announcements via that list. Google Groups provides a more neutral ground in the sense that users don’t have to have an account to use it (to an extent), as compared to the Facebook groups. We’ll keep the Facebook groups around, and depending on membership I’ll still send announcements there as well, but I encourage all to sign up on the Google Group if possible. In addition, having a mailing list will allow us to have more of a discussion. This way if you are working on a project in Facebook, or OpenSocial, or even WordPress or Twitter or other APIs and you run into issues, you can ask the group and we can work together to solve the problem. I figure this way we’ll be able to all build a strong Social Media Development community here in Utah that others can rely on. Google groups will also give us a page we can tell others about the group, when the next meeting is, etc. If you have some graphics and HTML skills to help with that I am open to volunteers!

Also, I have created a Google Code repository at http://code.google.com/p/utsmdev/. For anyone okay with producing their code under the GPL, this will give you a place to store your code, and collaborate with others on the code, track issues, etc. If you want commit permissions to that repository please contact me and I’ll add you. As Google App Engine gets more integration into these things we’ll also set up a hosting option through Google App Engine to actually host your apps. Hopefully all these options will make it all much easier for everyone to get out and collaborate in their coding. It’s a good time to be a developer…

P.S. – We will continue on in our every-other-month meeting structure now, so our next meeting will be the second Tuesday in May. I’m working on a speaker, so if you know anyone or have ideas let me know!