Facebook is Going Wiiiide Open

Raise your thumb if you remember the days when the world's largest social network was just a wee little platform we went to in order to see what our friends were up to.

Now raise your thumb if you've noticed that Facebook like buttons are suddenly turning up on all four corners of the internet.

With last Tuesday's launch of the Open Graph during the f8 conference, you and Facebook's 400 million other users can now raise your thumbs in "Like" of any web page that incorporates the network's open API platforms. Like this page, for example.

With just a little piece of code, we were able to incorporate Facebooks new Comments social plugin into the site. Now, anybody who comes across the Pay it Mom*ward site can like the site right then and there. The "Like" automatically gets published to your Facebook profile page, driving more people to the site.

The Comments plugin is just one of several new Social Plugins that turn Facebook into a middleman, allowing users and websites to interact with one another in such a way that none of your details are actually shared with the site. Besides the Comments function, Social Plugins allow users to do anything from liking a web page (Like Button), to liking a Facebook Page right from the website (Like Box).

All of this is in Facebook's grand scheme to take all of those connections we've built on Facebook and maintain them on any website in the world. 

In addition to Social Plugins, the rest of Facebook's revamped Facebook Platform offerings make creating a more social web easier than ever.

For instance, through Single Sign-on, it's no longer necessary for a site to put users through a registration process. If a site is using the Single Sign-on API, a user can long into the site with their Facebook Account.

Along those same lines is the Graph API. But instead of automatically signing in to a site through Facebook, the Graph API ports a users Facebook info over to the site in order to provide the site with the information necessary to create an account/sign in. Depending on your Facebook privacy settings, that page then has access to your Facebook acount details, just like one of your friends would.

For Facebook app developers, there is now a more robust and detailed analytics option. And for website owners who want to give their user a more personalized experience, there's the Server-side Personalization API.

Paired with Single Sign-on, Server-side Personalization increases the engagement on a site by personalizing the site's content based on a user's social graph.

So let's imagine BCClark.com is leveraging Server-side Personalization (it's not, by the way), and you like David Yurman on Facebook. BC Clark could use that tidbit of information to deliver you to a Yurman-optimized home page.

To see how some of the biggest sites in the world are integrating with the Facebook Platform and the Open Graph, check out this showcase of Facebook's newest best friends, get to know it all a bit better by reading up on the documentation, or pick a social plugin for your site to get started. Not quite your cup o' tea? Let us get our hands dirty in some of what we do best.