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This New Trend in Facebook Apps Looks Ugly

Posted on September 21, 2009 by jessestay

I was tipped today onto Hulu’s new Facebook app, which seems to be aiming to bring the Hulu website into Facebook by including videos and a stream in the app itself. The thing is, it’s hardly an app – it’s just the Hulu website in an HTML tag with an embeded stream widget inside. (Not sure what that is? Click the link to learn more about stream widgets) It’s something anyone (I would even argue you don’t even have to be a developer to do what they did) could do inside or outside Facebook, but they could do much better. They took the easy way out, and it better have cost them just 2 hours of their developers’ time to implement or they just got ripped off.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this trend of Facebook app design. I first saw it when a friend showed me the Hurley Pro Facebook app, also just a normal website, with a Facebook fan stream widget embedded inside, something that really barely even utilizes the Facebook API and the reasons you would integrate with Facebook in the first place. I’m sure Facebook isn’t complaining – in the end it does bring more traffic to Facebook and helps to spread the Facebook brand, but for the brands in question, I just can’t see how this is helping them at all!

Here’s what they’re missing out on by not having deeper integration:

Deep tracking – they have the potential to know the exact demographics of everyone visiting their app or site by digging a little deeper

Notifications, Invites, and Requests – without some FBML and API integration (see my book to learn more about that) there is no way for users to spread word of the app. The only way currently to do that via the means they’re doing it is to use the stream widget, which hardly does much to spread word of the app.

User tracking and customization – by using the Facebook API they could be knowing exactly who is visiting their app and customizing the experience to that user

Friend sharing – the most powerful feature of the Facebook API, there is no way currently to view what your friends are doing within the app. Hulu, for instance, could be showing the videos your friends are watching and favoriting and subscribing to. They can’t do that the way they’re doing it right now.

If I were Hulu, I would be looking for ways to utilize Facebook Connect to bring Facebook to their own brand. Look to integrate (see the “3 steps – that’s all!” part of this doc on the Facebook developers wiki) a simple one-click user login and registration button for Facebook on your site. Use the API to get the user’s friends and share what their other friends on Facebook using Hulu are doing. You can do all this on your own website.

Then allow your users to take action – share what your users are doing on Hulu with their friends on Facebook. Their friends on Facebook will see the interaction on Hulu and want to interact with your site as well. Hulu, you’re really missing out here, and it won’t be much work to just integrate a little more Facebook into your own brand. It’s time we start creating farms on our own turf and stop going out to do the fishing ourselves.

Hulu, contact me if you want some help in this.

"Fish Where the Fish Are" No Longer Applies

Posted on September 19, 2009 by jessestay

My good friend, Jeremiah Owyang had a great quote he liked to share in his presentations, stating that the days of old-style marketing, forcing your customers to your site, no longer applied. He stated that we must “Fish Where the Fish Are“, and right he was. With the advent of Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace, etc. it was now possible for companies to get into the conversations of their customers, where they were conversing rather than trying to get them back to their own site to encourage that. I’d like to suggest that even that philosophy’s evolving though, and like with the previous philosophy, Facebook’s leading the way. Now, instead of “Fishing where the Fish are”, you can bring the entire lake to your website and again, those conversations are again all happening under your own brand. Now you get to fish in your own backyard.

Last year Facebook introduced Facebook Connect to developers to enable developers to integrate the Facebook Platform right on their own websites. I’m not sure developers or businesses fully knew what was coming at the time, but it sounded good. Mark Zuckerberg talked about expanding the ability to share on Facebook to the web, and keeping the fine-grained privacy controls Facebook is known for along with that. I believe a new way of marketing may have begun with that launch.

If you get a chance, go sign into HuffingtonPost.com through your Facebook login. Look – all your friends from Facebook just automatically got imported onto HuffingtonPost.com with just one click! And you never left the site. Huffington Post gets this concept – their readers’ conversations on Facebook are all happening through their own website, and they’re enabling new conversations from that! Their users never have to go back to Facebook to converse the news they’re reading with their friends.

Another great example is Digg.com. If you log in through Facebook there you’ll notice with no effort your friends all get imported as friends on Digg. Now, every new friend that logs into Digg via those means also gets added, automatically, as a friend on the site. Digg has brought Facebook back to their own brand.

Soon you’ll start to see the same for microblogging. Whether it happens via Facebook, or via open source platforms such as Laconi.ca or WordPress, brands will begin to bring ways for you to bring short-form conversations to their sites as well, enabling you to post out to Twitter, Facebook, and others and bring those conversations back into the site. This is the way it all started, and now we’re able to merge the old marketing and new marketing into a more complete solution that brings the brand back into the equation.

There are many tools available now, and many being developed right now that are bringing that “sea of fish” back onto your own property. Tools like Facebook Connect are teaching you how to fish in that backyard pond so you can feed a multitude. Now you can swim with the best of them in your own swimming pool!

Wishlist Wednesday – Facebook Connect for Retailers

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jessestay

I think we may be onto a tradition today. In celebration of @jesse mccartney’s birthday (see my last post for background), I’ve got one more wish. This one is for Retailers and how they can better integrate Facebook Connect. Specifically those with physical store locations – I think this one’s pretty cool, and would be really simple to implement! The idea is the ability to truly identify individuals visiting your store.

Here’s how it would work:

Customers download a custom app for their cell phone (this would probably be most effective on an Android or Palm Pre phone). This app connects them through Facebook Connect and logs them in to your store.

On your servers you identify the individual’s Facebook account (by simply storing their Facebook ID with their customer account) – you now know exactly who they are – their name, their location, their interests, and more.

When the customer visits one of your stores, their cell phone recognizes they are at that location (assuming they’ve given it permission to do so), and you’re able to identify the customer is now at one of your stores. Now, imagine the implications:
- The customer needs help – they push a little “I need help!” button on their cell phone. Immediately a CSR is notified, and they can send someone, to their exact location within the store, to help or answer questions. They can even greet the individual by name!
- The customer visits the cash register. The cash register realizes this and immediately brings up the customer’s name so the sales rep can greet them by name and even know a little of their past history with the company so they can help further.
- Your company could keep a list of influential bloggers. When they visit your store, you are immediately notified, and you can ensure they are getting the best experience necessary.
- More importantly, you now have a record of exactly how many people are visiting your store, who they are, various demographics about those people, and what they’re purchasing, if they’re purchasing anything.

Let’s take this a little further now. Imagine if your customers could track their friends that are also shopping at the store. They could organize shopping trips, see what others amongst their friends are buying, view the most popular purchased items amongst their friends, and more. Or perhaps you could release a coupon to individuals and only allow them to share it with 5 of their Facebook friends. There are so many possibilities when you think about actually being able to identify individuals, and their friends who physically shop at your stores.

When thinking Facebook Connect don’t just think virtual! I would use something like the above, and I know many others will too, especially in a privacy-controlled environment like Facebook. What other ideas can you think of, mixing GPS with Facebook Connect?

My Facebook Connect Wishlist (for WordPress)

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jessestay

Today everyone seems to be wishing me a Happy Birthday – it’s not really, but it is @jessemccartney’s birthday on Twitter, so I get all the “ZOMG Happy Birthday @jesse mccartney” Tweets from uber-excited fans. Some times I throw them a bone and tell them how much I love them as well. It’s fun to celebrate your birthday twice a year, so hey, why not? So I thought I’d celebrate @jesse mccartney’s birthday on Twitter with a wishlist of my own. Take it as you may, but my hope is that maybe it inspires you just a little bit to go out and create something, especially if you’re a Facebook developer. And if you don’t do it, I will. Eventually.

Here’s my wishlist. All of these are ways I can see Wordpess could be used to integrate Facebook, but no one has written a plugin yet to do what I want – please check out the documentation at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect for an overview on what you can do (it’s actually quite easy!):

1. A single, standalone “Connect with Facebook” button plugin – so many Facebook plugins for WordPress try to do too many things in one plugin. I want to be able to build my own Facebook integration. Add a little component here. Add a little component there. Nothing more. So, do do this, I need, at the very basic level a “Connect with Facebook” button that shows up somewhere on my blog just by installing a WordPress plugin.

You could take this further though. What if you also provided a script that reads the e-mail addresses of commenters and automatically registered them with Facebook so that if I ever wanted to do a to encourage my readers to invite their friends, they could very easily? The button could appear as an overlay that appears once for each user, and if they opt not to log in, never appears again. When the user logs in via Facebook you automatically register them with a Facebook ID.

That’s all the plugin will do. Its focus is simply login and registration and loading the basic Facebook Connect libraries, nothing more. If you want it to do more, use another plugin that builds on top of it.

2. TweetMeme for Facebook plugin – if you haven’t had the chance yet, go look at Mashable.com, now. See their Facebook share button underneath the retweet button? That’s what I want, but I want more. Here’s how I see it:

A reader reads an article. They want to share it with their Facebook friends, so they click on the share button.

WordPress, via a plugin, calls the stream.publish() to enable the reader to publish the article to their own stream.

Your plugin tracks the ID of that particular share, maybe even prompting the user for read permissions, and adds it to an array of shared IDs in an options storage in WordPress.

On every load of that particular article, each share’s likes are read, counted, and updated in another stored variable in WordPress.

The sum of all those likes is displayed in the share button, and other readers can also share to their friends and contribute to the number of likes for that article.

Of course, this would rely on the blog owner installing the Facebook authentication plugin above in #1

3. A “publish to Facebook” plugin that works – there are already lots of publish to Facebook plugins for WordPress. None of them fully utilize Facebook Connect though, especially the stream methods. What if I could publish a blog post, have it automatically also post into my Facebook stream, and at the same time, track every comment and like of that specific post and then post comments to the share button above, while listing comments of the particular post down below my blog post comments? Or, let’s take that further. If one of my friends on Facebook comments on the blog post itself, I also want that friend’s same comment to show up under the published stream item on Facebook as well. I think that would be incredibly useful.

4. A “leave a comment” plugin that works – I think the same could happen with comments. TechCrunch is doing this somewhat. A user that comments should have the option of publishing that comment to Facebook in the user’s stream. What also should happen though is that comment ought to be tracked. Now, when any of a user’s friends that are also previous commenters on that blog comment on Facebook, they also appear threaded underneath that specific blog comment on the blog. Or vice-versa.

5. A standalone friends widget – I want a friends widget just like the Google FriendConnect widget you see over to the right. It ought to come with a “subscribe” button, or “join my community”. When a reader subscribes, they automatically (unless they opt-out) get new blog posts for your blog added to their stream on publish, real-time. This would also work great if you develop RSS reader software, as you could also automatically subscribe the user to the blog in your reader. Again, it should be standalone though – people should be able to mix-and-match, and this would also rely on #1 above being installed.

6. An activity streams plugin – I would put this top on my list if I could (even though it’s at the bottom, because it’s the most code to develop). If you haven’t had the chance to yet, regardless of your political preference, go check out what HuffingtonPost.com has done with Facebook Connect. Log in with Facebook Connect there and you’ll see one of the coolest implementations of Facebook Connect I’ve ever seen. I wish they would release that to the open source community as a Facebook plugin for WordPress.

All the activity streams plugin needs to do is track activity of readers on a blog. A new view of the blog would appear, showing all of your friends who are also readers of the blog, and a historical news feed or timeline of what they’ve just read, what they’re commenting on, along with any other cool activity that may be pertinent. The idea is to help a blog’s readers discover new content on your blog. This plugin could track the most popular blog items, most commented, etc. and display those on the side for readers to discover. Each stream would be custom to that reader and their Facebook friends that read the blog. It could also have options to invite friends to come check out the blog.

This specific plugin could also integrate with #5 above and enable a reader to click on one of their friends, and see only the activity of that specific friend. Or, when inviting their Facebook friends to check out the blog, it could provide a way for each of those friends to subscribe and automatically receive new blog updates for the blog in Facebook.

The possibilities are endless, but I think you catch my drift. You can even package all the above into a single plugin, but I also want separate plugins. This stuff, to my knowledge, has not been developed yet, but it should. I want you to go out and build it before I’m forced to – these are free ideas and a great way to show your talent, get some free exposure here (I’ll write about each one that does this effectively), and a great amount of traffic from both Facebook’s plugin directory and WordPress’s plugin directory when you’re finished.

Let me know if you’ve written one of these – either let me know in the comments, e-mail me, send me a “Happy Birthday @jesse mccartney” or whatever. I hope I’ve started your brain juices flowing – I’m salivating at the thought! (mmm…brain juices)

Making WWW::Facebook::API Facebook Connect Ready

Posted on July 4, 2009 by jessestay

I’m going to get geeky on you here again. I’ve been working on a few things with SocialToo to enable Facebook Connect on the site – more on that to come. What I’ve been surprised by though is that this long after the launch of Facebook Connect the main Perl libraries for Facebook, WWW::Facebook::API, still do not support Facebook Connect. The main difference between making API calls from a native Facebook app and a third-party Facebook Connect app is that in the native app, you verify the signature via the URI parameters, via parameters that begin with “fb_sig_”. In Facebook Connect, those variables are set in Cookies by the Facebook Client-side Javascript libraries, and begin with your applications API key, so they’d start something like “(api key)_”, and come from the cookies instead of the URI. You can read more about that here.

So for full compatibility in your preferred Facebook API libraries, both the URI parameters have to be checked along with the Cookies in the event the developer is trying to connect from a third-party website. In the PHP libraries this is already done for you. Surprisingly, Perl has not yet implemented this.

So I got to work on it, and through a couple simple lines of code added to WWW::Facebook::API::Canvas I was able to make get_fb_params check your cookies when the URI parameters are not presence. I’ve submitted the patch to the library’s owner, Clayton Scott, but in case you want to integrate it sooner you can apply it to the 0.4.14 version of Canvas.pm by downloading this patch.

I hope you’re able to get as much out of this as I am – please let me know if you see any potential bugs with the changes.

Stay N’ Alive Now Supports Facebook Connect!

Posted on December 25, 2008 by jessestay

Thanks to the Disqus team, along with the guys at Sociable, we’re now supporting Facebook Connect on Stay N’ Alive. It all starts over on the right under Community, where you can see other Facebook users that have visited the site recently. Then, now, when you comment, if you logout of Disqus, and then choose the login option again, you’ll now have the option to login via Facebook Connect and have your comment identified as such. The Disqus guys are continually working to improve this, but now you have one more option to communicate on the site. Oh, and when you comment, your friends should also see your comment in their Facebook News Feeds! Just a little Christmas gift to my readers…

Potential Applications of Facebook Connect in E-Commerce

Posted on December 15, 2008 by jessestay

I’m way too late on this, since it’s been mentioned several times already, but I thought I’d share a little presentation Jesse Pickard and the Razorfish guys did that I had the opportunity to help out on. Jesse asked me several questions about Facebook Connect a few months ago, and he turned it into this excellent presentation on potential uses of the platform for E-Commerce. In it, he uses iTunes, the iPhone (I still predict that’s coming – I always have, as has Facebook), and Amazon all as examples of potential integration points for Facebook Connect. These types of services have tremendous potential to see maximum success from integrating social networking into their own e-commerce platforms. They do risk some privacy, but that’s the advantage of Facebook – they are one of the few services out there which allow for privacy controls of their users, and they are only getting better at it.

I’d really like to see more e-commerce organizations embrace Facebook Connect. If I can be of help in doing so, please contact me! You can read more about it via the presentation Jesse Pickard made:

Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential[swfobj style=”margin:0px” width=”425″ height=”355″ src=”http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=fbconnectrazorfish-1228360493956517-8&stripped_title=portable-social-graphs-imagining-their-potential-presentation” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”]

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)

Facebook, as a Developer, I’m Scared!

Posted on May 18, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve attempted to stay out of this until now because as Nick O’Neill implies, it’s pretty childish the way both the supporters and critics are handling this. I’m especially disappointed with the way Facebook is handling the Google Friend Connect issue. For those out of the loop, Facebook cancelled Google’s Friend Connect App on Facebook because, “it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service”. Facebook gave no examples of what sections of the Terms of Service Google was violating, nor did they explain why Google was wrong. This vaguely-presented move prevents Google from having a universal login and profile that includes Facebook.

Google responded today saying, “We read the Facebook numeric id, friendly name, and public photo URLs of the user and their friends. We read no other information.” Google then proceeded to show detailed examples of the data they are retrieving from Facebook, how it is presented back to them, and the fact that they only share the URL of the user’s public photo with third party applications. They also stated that they only store data for 30 minutes at a time, after which they purge any of the above data cached on their servers.

I was impressed with Google’s response, and due to the openness and (apparent) honesty of it, I’m edging towards Google’s side on this, and quite scared as a Facebook developer on what Facebook could do with my own Apps. Assuming Google is right and not leaving anything out, Facebook could potentially remove any developer’s App from Facebook, no questions asked (although they did say they contacted Google multiple times about “something”), even though, per the developer’s understanding of the Terms of Service, the developer’s App follows the rules.

Based on what Google has said, I can’t see anything they did wrong in the development of their App that violates the Terms of Service. I really wish Facebook would explain further so we as developers could ensure our Apps aren’t doing the same. It also brings up many important questions as to what Facebook means when it comes to certain parts of the Terms of Service. I’m actually quite confused now as to what I can and can’t do on Facebook.

For example, Section 2a-6 in the Terms of Service, it states:

“You may retain copies of Exportable Facebook Properties for such period of time (if any) as the Applicable Facebook User for such Exportable Facebook Properties may approve, if (and only if) such Applicable Facebook User expressly approves your doing so pursuant to an affirmative “opt-in” after receiving a prominent disclosure of (a) the uses you intend to make of such Exportable Facebook Properties, (b) the duration for which you will retain copies of such Exportable Facebook Properties and (c) any terms and conditions governing your use of such Exportable Facebook Properties (a “Full Disclosure Opt-In”);”

Yet, in the section before that, it says I can only store indefinitely the uid, nid, eid, gid, pid, aid, notes_count, and profile_update_time. Does this mean I can or can’t get a user’s permission to store data on my servers? What about permanent session keys? I don’t see them in that list, yet the documentation seems to imply you need one to auto-authenticate a user. Am I breaking the developer ToS by storing a permanent session key?

Google is passing the public photo URL to third parties. Technically, because this is public information, it doesn’t even take a developer key to retrieve that URL. I could simply pull up the user’s profile page via their profile ID, and scrape the photo from the public profile. Is this really what’s causing Google to have their App removed? If so, I’m really scared as a Facebook App developer.

As you can see, the Facebook developer Terms of Service are simply too vague and too confusing for any developer to feel secure about keeping their App on the network. With actions like the one Facebook took against Google, I now have to question if my Apps too could be a target for Facebook to remove. If Google, who has hundreds of Lawyers on hand to look over such terms can’t figure out what they can and can’t do on the service, how can I, as a developer know what I can and can’t do on the service? Right now it’s a complete guessing game, with just the hope that Facebook will be decent enough to give you a warning before canceling your App. Is this really how we as developers should be developing our Apps?

I really hope Facebook can clarify this matter. I think after this move by Facebook, Facebook needs to clarify their Terms of Service for Developers and first, explain according to what violation in the Terms of Service Google’s App was removed, and second, break down in plain English what we as developers can and can’t do.

Facebook, Google laid out all their cards, at least as far as we can tell (and even if not they certainly laid out way more than Facebook did). How about not leaving us developers hanging and clarify all this once and for all? As a developer, I’m absolutely confused and scared at the moment of the very Walled Garden I make a living off of.

Photo courtesy CommonSpace.org