Facebook Connect: Why and how to use it on your website

Back in July (when the weather was a little sunny and not bitterly cold) i wrote a blog post about using your Facebook profile on Digg. Just to recap, it was regarding the rather great ability to use your Facebook profile to login to Digg without registering an entire new Digg account, on top of that it also allows Digg to post information back to your wall as a news feed to let all your friends know what you have been Digging.

Well after allowing websites like Digg, and Stumbleupon to use Facebook connect it seems that the big FB are set to allow any website to use Facebook Connect on November the 30th and you should be quickly scurrying to work out how you are going to incorporate it into your site. Here’s why and how…

Firstly. The Why?

There are really three major reasons why you should be using Facebook connect on your website, and i am sure that as the platform progresses, there will become many many more.

  1. Users can use their existing Facebook profiles to login to your site:
    Whilst many people may think that not having users register with you could damage your site, this probably will not be the case at all. I am sure there has been many a time that you or I have come to a website for some information only to find that you have to go through a long registration process to get the information you want. I can certainly say that i have hit the back button and got the info from elsewhere. With Facebook connect your users can simply hit the Facebook login button, find the information they want, and stay on your site.
  2. You get information back about the user:
    Amongst other things, Facebook can tell you how many of the user’s friends are already members of your site. You can put a link somewhere that says, “Three of your friends already use the site – invite them to connect.” This can dramatically increase engagement of your existing users by drawing them back to your site. Not only this you can show the friends activity on a page within your site, so that users have yet another reason to return.
    Facebook also let you pull certain information about the user such as basic profile info, avatar image etc, this can save you space on your server by hosting everything in a centralised location.
  3. You get to advertise on Facebook for free:
    Whenever a user on your site does an action, you can post this information onto their wall. Obviously i don’t need to tell you how valuable this is, as not only does it appear in the news feed it also encourages their friends to click through onto your site and then we are back to point number 1.

Stumble reviews posting back to Facebook

You can see a great example of how Facebook Connect is working on the Facebook Example Site

Secondly. The How?

The first thing to do is go and check out the Facebook Wiki on The Anatomy of a Facebook Connect Site then bring yourself back here, and we’ll go through a few steps incase your still unsure of how to implement it.

Back already? Gee you are a fast reader, ok now take a look at the image below to get an idea about how Facebook Connect works in the background…

So the image above explains how it all works, but how do you put it into your site?

  1. Download the sample code that is provided by Facebook – This is the code used for their example site and will be a great help.
  2. The code above will show you all the little neat tricks of Facebook, such as the friends selector, group links, events links, that you can implement to allow users to effectively share your site on Facebook
  3. You need to go into Facebook and enable the Developers application, if you can’t find it simply do a search for Developers on the Facebook search bar.
  4. Set up your application using the instructions found in the Facebook wiki
  5. Insert your application API key into the test code that you downloaded above and visit your demo site. You should now see the Facebook connect login button which will allow you to login using your details.

Finally, just go and read everything on the developers wiki to get yourself up to speed with other features, and then you can start to look to implement the sections of code into your site. Start of by getting the login button working, then by getting some information back from FB about the user. Once you have mastered that you can then get onto the good stuff like writing back to users walls, and allowing them to invite friends to your site.

There is no doubt in my mind that Facebook connect will be a massive step forwarding in bringing around a centralised way of logging into websites and getting meaningful information about your users. From a search marketing perspective you can gain literally hundreds of new visitors a day to your site. If you have a login form then you should be looking at this now.

I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on Facebook Connect, and if you think you will be implementing it on your site.

Amazing Mario and Zelda orchestrated music

Ok, so this is massively off topic from what i normally write about but i figured there maybe a few Nintendo fanboys of old who visit my blog, and thought that these are just to amazing to pass over.

There is a symphony group called Play! which go around the world and perform classic tunes from video games in their amazing orchestra. Unfortunately they don’t have an amazing web designer and the music plays straight away on their site. Anyway, I have recently come across two youtube videos which made smile and my spine tingle (yes i am a Nintendo GEEK) respectively. Without banging on i’ll just put them below for you to enjoy…

Super Mario Brothers:

The Legend of Zelda:

The second video is by far the best, but then again i am a die hard Zelda fan, and just makes me salivate at the thought of a fully orchestrated Zelda game. If you have played Zelda before and don’t break down in tears around the 4 minute mark then your not human 😀

Back to normal next week 🙂

Facebook bring back captcha’s for messaging

I was just sending my friend some driving directions to my house though the Facebook messaging system, and was surprised to see that when i hit send i was asked to put in a Captcha. I know that Facebook used to make you put in a captcha for adding friends until you registered your mobile phone. Obviously i have been fully registered on the site for a while now and haven’t seen a captcha on the site for ages.

There has been a lot of messaging spam flying about Facebook recently so it doesn’t surprise me that they have brought back captcha’s, and you don’t have to put on in for every message it sends. I tried sending 10 different messages to 10 different people and was only asked to input the captcha three times so its not that bad.

Although it is a annoying to have to put in a captcha, it should cut the spam sending down dramatically, so i think i can live with it 🙂

SEO is not a real job…

…or so a (tsk) .net development blog would have you believe.

I have just read the above linked post on reddit which is from a .net development blog. At first i was very frustrated about how someone could be so ignorant about an industry that they obviously don’t understand, but then at the same time i started to think about how people do view the SEO/SEM industry in a negative light. I know it has been discussed to death about how some SEO’s come across as snake oil salesmen but i feel that this post deserves some attention, especially due to the negativity of some of the reddit comments that people have left. Before i even get started on my views though i will present you with the opening paragraph of the enlightened post…

Let’s face it: SEO is a joke, not a job.
Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his spare time, working on the strength of contents or services offered. A little bit of social bookmarking, a little bit of fuss on major social or professional networks, a little bit of impression exchange, a little bit of back-links here and there: it doesn’t seem to me as a big deal.

Pretty convincing stuff huh? Well not entirely. It seem like this guy has absolutely no idea what real SEO involves. In fact he seems to think that if you just develop a website to standards then you are going to automatically rank for your chosen terms. He even goes on to say that “getting noticed on the web is extremely easy, just with a little reading and even less intelligence.”

Now anyone who has tried to create a site and get it to rank for anything which is remotely competitive will certainly find that getting noticed on the web is far from easy. You obviously have to get the site architecture right, get your pages linking to each other correctly, make sure that you title tags and meta descriptions line up with the page content, ensure that there is no duplication of content, actually right decent content and get it up and indexed by the big G. Now that’s just the on page side of things, we all know how hard it can be to get free links hence why linkbait and creative viral is so effective, and usually not cheap. Lets not even get into link buying which can cost a lot of money for a small site to break into a competitive area.

So its quite obvious that SEO is a job, because if not it wouldnt be a multi million pound industry. However i do see why people look at us so bad. There are so many stories of companies ripping people off and saying how they will submit your site to a gazillion search engines, but it is so frustrating when uneducated fools make comments and posts like the one above. I know some people have bounced around the ideas of having academic standards in the world of SEO, and whilst i am against it, it could help solve some of the negativity that surrounds us all?

Oh, and don’t even get me started about the post author disabling the right click on his website! 1999 called, it wants its javascript back 🙂