Sweet Chalet

I wanted to highlight the Facebook Page from one of our users. Its simple, but elegant and I thought it would be great to share just one idea about what our users have done with the app.

Sweet Chalet is out of Toronto, Ontario and sells cakes and other sweets. You can visit the Sweet Chalet Facebook Page to check them out.

Again, if you have an interesting Facebook Page that uses one of the My Info family of custom page tab apps, please share it with us!

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Example Use of My Info: Custom Tab on Facebook

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For performance reasons, we are only displaying the first two to three likes and comments, just like Facebook does on their own pages. If you click “View All” then you will be taken to a full Facebook page for that status update that shows you all of the comments.

Please note that we have not yet added back the ability to post new comments, but we are working on that as well as allowing you to like a checkin or comment.

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For performance reasons, we are only displaying the first two to three likes and comments, just like Facebook does on their own pages. If you click “View All” then you will be taken to a full Facebook page for that status update that shows you all of the comments.

Please note that Facebook only exposes your past status history to a certain point. It is a function of both the number of status updates as well as how long ago they were. Users that post a high volume of status updates won’t be able to go as far back in time as users with less status updates. Unfortunately, this is a limit of Facebook and there is nothing we can do about it.

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Google Plus is very proud of its photo features, especially the instant uploads from Android phones, and today’s Plus update also adds new photo editing tools called Creative Kit. It has basic editing tools as well as filters like everybody has these days.

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What’s Hot On Google Plus

What’s Hot appears underneath new posts inside the main stream as well as in the Sparks area on the left sidebar. It’s a new way to discover content on Plus that makes a nice algorithmic complement to the right-now real-time search tool. Discovery on Plus is now nicely positioned between the ways Facebook and Twitter work.

Ripples: Watch Sharing Happen

Ripples is a sexy feature that lets you visually follow the flow of a conversation. It even incorporates some analytics. That’s much more data than other social networks give casual users about their posts. Very Google-y. Visual representations of data are catching on at the Googleplex. The Google Analytics team also recently introduced a flow visualization tool.

Creative Kit for Photos

Google touts 3.4 billion photo uploads as its favorite metric of the success of Plus. When Android users (who have turned on Google Plus) take a photo, it uploads automatically, so that’s sort of cheating. The photos are kept private until a user decides to share them on Plus, which then makes them visible instantly. If Google talked about how many photos were shared, then we’d have a real sense.

Today’s update gives Plus users some tools to spruce up their photos, which may increase sharing as users get more excited about photos. Trendy filters and Halloween gimmicks aside, Plus users can do much more with photos now.

The editing tools are desktop-only for now, but I’d put money on them coming to mobile apps soon.

What do you think of these new Google Plus features?

Discuss

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The following is an excerpt of an entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains walk-throughs and strategies for posting links to your Page on other Pages, creating Events as a Page, and finding content to post to your fans through a news feed of Pages that your Page Likes. 

When Facebook redesigned Pages in February 2011 one of the features it implemented was the ability for administrators to use Facebook ‘as’ their Page (as opposed to as a user), providing access to additional tools and allowing admins to interact and engage in and around Facebook as their brand. Here we’ll walk-through how to “Use Facebook as Page” to gain exposure for your Page and increase your Like count.

The benefits of doing this include:

• Easy access to Page metrics, including new fans, activity, Likes and comments
• Personalized Page News Feed
• Page Events
• Engagement with other Pages, raising brand awareness around Facebook and driving visitors and new Likes

Using Facebook as Your Page

To use Facebook as your Page, login as normal and click the drop-down arrow on the far right side of the top navigation bar and select “Use Facebook as Page”. Then select which of the Pages you admin to browse as.

Alternatively, visit your Page, then click on the ‘Use Facebook as [Page name]’ link at the top of the right sidebar’s admin menu. The screen will refresh and you will now be using Facebook as your Page.

To revert back to using Facebook as your user profile, select “Switch back to [your name] link in the top navigation drop-down, or click on the now-changed “Use Facebook as [your name]“ link at the top of your Page’s right sidebar.

Page Likes and Notifications

There are subtle but important changes to the way the site works when you are using Facebook as your Page. The Likes and Notifications buttons on the top left of the Page now display data for the Page itself (as opposed to the user’s profile) – click on either of these to display more information.

If you visit Facebook’s Notifications section whilst using Facebook as your Page you will see all of the notifications for that Page, which can be convenient as an overview of activity over the past week.

Friend requests is replaced with a count of new Likes of your Page. Notifications is replaced with a list of mentions, shares, wall posts, post comments and user activity on or related to your page. This can be a great way of keeping track of influencers that are interacting with or sharing your Page’s content.

Note that there is no way to access Messages while using Facebook as a Page as Pages cannot currently send private messages to users. Similarly, while Pages can visit the profiles of users, they cannot post on their walls or comment on their posts, but can reshare their posts.

Access walk-throughs and strategies for how to “Use Facebook as Page” to engage with other Pages and distribute links to your Page in the full version of this article, available in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to how all of Facebook’s features can be employed for marketing.

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Even if they are all recycled, it’s still pretty cool considering only one week has elapsed since Facebook made the new timeline profile available to those who have the Developer application installed on their profiles.

We’ve previously covered three such tools: Coverize.me, Facebook Timeline Cover Creator and Facebook Covers. Today we discovered two more of them.

Fresh Facebook Covers has different 211 images, grouped into the following categories: popular, for girls, for boys, celebrities, TV shows, music, quotes, cute and random.

Like the other tools in this space, all of these covers have Fresh Facebook Covers’ web address stamped in the lower right-hand corner — do you want that in your profile?

On Fresh Facebook Covers, the button “download this cover” appearing beneath all of the images makes it look like you’ll automatically capture the image,  but clicking on it simply opens up a larger version of the graphic a new tab. You have to save it yourself and then upload it on your own to your timeline.

Meanwhile, FacebookCovers.org contains 50 cover images and lists 16 categories, some of which don’t yet have anything in them.

These groups are labeled: abstract, animals, awareness, awesome, cute, funny, hearts, life, love, movies, music, people, quotes, sports, TV shows and video games.

To the right of each image on FacebookCovers.org there’s a button labeled “add to profile.”

Clicking on the link fires up a permission window asking your permission for access to your profile, but all that does is upload the chosen graphic to your photo albums. You still have to click on “change cover.”

Also, like the others we’ve covered (pun intended if you want), all of the images available on FacebookCovers.org bear the site’s brand name in the lower-right-hand corner.

It’s easy to erase that branding in any graphics editor, although it would be impolite of us to recommend that practice.

So, dear readers, have you tried out any of the applications for tricking out your cover image in Facebook’s timeline?

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Zeny Huang is an Emerging Media Strategist at JWT New York where she helps brands connect with fans in innovative and meaningful ways using social media. You can follow her on Twitter @Zenidala.

When Facebook unveiled Timeline last week, many users were struck by the idea of humanizing your profile by summarizing your life and connections.

But what if you’re not a human at all?

Timeline may have a similar effect on brands as well. In fact, the brand benefits of Timeline could be huge, and will let companies tell a more engaging and authentic story. This is one reason (beyond the 800 million active users) that brands should be celebrating the new changes to Facebook even if the network hasn’t yet confirmed that brand pages will employ Timeline. Here are a few more reasons we hope they do.

More Pictures, More Branding Opportunities

Burberry

From New York agency Skinny.

Harley-Davidson

From Skinny.

Kanye West

From Skinny.

The New York Yankees

From Skinny.

McDonald’s

From Skinny.

Coca-Cola

From Ryan Kennedy.

RedBull

From Ryan Kennedy.

Mercedes

From Skinny.

The Muppets

From Ryan Kennedy.

Big Spaceship

The New York-based digital agency reimagines its own Facebook presence.

Skinny

Skinny reimagines its own Facebook Page.

McCann Digital

The Israeli digital ad agency experiments with its own Facebook look.

According to Dr. John Medina’s book Brain Rules, vision is our most powerful sense, and “we learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.” This helps explain the popularity of infographics, photo apps like Instagram and visual blog platforms like Tumblr. We increasingly consume information through photos, from browsing friends’ Facebook albums to mobile Twitpics. Accordingly, Facebook has made photos a main focus of the new Timeline profile.

Compared to the current Facebook brand page (which only allows the profile picture and five thumbnails to be customized, hiding photo albums and tagged photos beneath the Wall), Timeline unlocks new possibilities for branding, raising awareness and creativity. The “Cover,” an 849 by 312 pixel image spanning the top of your profile, can be changed at any time and is major real estate for a brand — perfect for a product shot or promotion push. In addition, brands could call out important photos on the Timeline by clicking a star on the post that expands the photo to widescreen.

Brands Can Be More Interesting

Currently, the hidden “Info” tab on the Facebook brand page serves as a dumping ground for every bit of information about a brand in a boring text format. When deciding whether to drive paid media to Facebook or a brand site, brands face the challenge of choosing between growing their Facebook community or providing a more informative and better user experience elsewhere. Now, the decision tips a bit more in Facebook’s favor as Timeline makes it easier for people to find information by pushing the Info section, photos, apps and map to the top of the page in a clear navigation bar.

While conversations on Facebook still matter, information and content have become more prominent in the Timeline design. The infinite scroll prolongs the lifespan of brand content, giving people more to engage and consume, which will lead to more chatter, and focuses more on quality of posts over quantity, since posts don’t disappear “below the fold” of the Facebook wall.

With the focus shifting from building conversation to sharing content, the purpose of a Facebook brand page will be less about selling and more about telling an authentic story. Brands can express what makes them unique and build an emotional connection with fans through behind-the-scenes photos, blooper videos, real-time mobile pictures, sound clips and exclusive news. In addition to expressing the brand in the present, a brand can utilize the Timeline to speak to its past to reignite nostalgia and sentiment that may be associated with it.

It Simplifies What It Means to Be on Facebook

The focus on telling a brand story lowers the barriers to entry for brands on Facebook, especially small businesses like a car repair shop, florist or restaurant that don’t have the budget or content to sustain a community. Prior to Timeline, brands often felt confused as to how Facebook fit into their brand strategy and felt the need to have a gimmicky app or sampling incentive for people to “Like” or engage with their page. According to ExactTarget, of the people who “Like” Facebook brand pages, 40% are doing that to receive discounts and promotions. Now with the larger post size and photos, Timeline can easily serve as a brand blog, providing fans with frequent and engaging updates in a neatly packaged profile.

The same challenges of building a brand hub and bringing the brand to life on Facebook still exist, but the design of Timeline will make content creation easier by providing a skeleton for brands to fill in.

It’s a Great Move for Facebook

Two months ago, I suggested that Google+ brand pages could be better than Facebook’s. At the time, I could only focus on what Facebook had done wrong for brand pages — poor user experience, few branding opportunities and limited analytics. With the launch of the Timeline, I am happy to say that Facebook has done something right.

Brands, especially small businesses, may forgo creating a blog or unique domain page, opting to use Facebook Timeline instead due to the massive number of active Facebook users and the simplicity of setting up a page. All I ask of Facebook now is for more robust analytics, especially adding a “time spent” metric that can be drilled down by demographic and location so brands can better measure and analyze engagement. After all, it is called Timeline.

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

The New Facebook Profile: Timeline

Timeline is a radical departure from previous versions of the Facebook user profile. The most prominent feature is the addition of a cover photo at the top of the page. Users can change this to whatever they’d like it to be.

1987

In 1987, my sister was born. Facebook knows these life events and includes them in your timeline.

Being Born

You can even add a picture and context to your birth, which starts the Timeline.

Timeline Interface

The Timeline is a two-column interface with top photos, status updates, friends and more.

Map

Facebook has added a feature that lets you see where you have visited. This is powered by Facebook Places.

Photos in the Timeline

Here’s how photos are displayed in the Timeline.

Friends in the New Timeline

Here’s what the Friends page looks like.

Changing Settings

Some of the new Timeline’s customization features.

2009

More of the new Timeline

Getting Married

You can add life events, such as getting married, to your profile through the Publisher Bar. You can also announce that you broke a bone, got a new job, etc.

More About: brands, Business, facebook timeline, features, Marketing, Social Media

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To make the most of Facebook’s improved lists, we bring you this guide and analysis.

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Friend Lists: Facebook Finally Gets Its Act Together

In its announcement post for the new lists, Facebook disingenuously states that "you've told us how time-consuming it is to organize lists for different parts of your life and keep them up to date."

In fact, it wasn’t just time-consuming to manage Facebook lists – it was a challenge to even find this feature, let alone use it. Lists in Facebook had been buried in illogical navigation and a confusing design.

It’s more likely that Facebook saw that people really liked Google Plus Circles (which are basically lists of friends) and recognized that it needed to vastly improve its own lists feature.

To its credit though, Facebook also recognized that there is a large flaw in Circles. Which is that they are a pain to manually create and maintain. To be honest, I gave up maintaining my Circles after the first week or so.

Smart Lists

So Facebook came up with the idea of automated friends lists, which is what the new "Smart Lists" are. To get started, go to your Facebook homepage and click the "Lists" link in the left-hand menu.

There are 4 types of smart lists right now:

• Work
• School
• Family
• City

Facebook creates these lists based on your profile information, for example where you live.

The donkey work of creating the smart lists is done for you, but you can also manually curate them.

The default lists aren’t perfect. For example Facebook gave me two work lists, both named ReadWriteWeb. It turns out that this is due to Facebook’s messy transition to Pages for brands. One of my work lists is comprised of our staff who list the old page as their employer, the other list is made up of staff who link to the newer (and up-to-date) ReadWriteWeb Page.

So there’s room for improvement, but still it’s great that Facebook creates some default lists and makes a decent attempt at populating them. +1 over Google Plus, which leaves all of the list making work up to its users.

Close Friends & Acquaintances

These two lists are template lists that you need to fill in (or merge old lists into the new ones). However there is a neat automation aspect to them, which is that your news feed will show more from those on your "Close Friends" list than from people in your "Acquaintances" list.

What About Your Existing Lists?

If you’d somehow managed to navigate the previous design and created Facebook lists, those are still available. Facebook offers the option to merge any old lists that match the new options.

It just so happens I already had a work list called "Team RWW," so I merged that with the new "ReadWriteWeb" list.

Selected Sharing

This is where Facebook most wants to emulate Google Plus, by enabling selected sharing of updates to certain lists.

You had the option to do this even before the new lists were launched, by using the ‘Custom’ link. But that process wasn’t well designed and I suspect that most people were oblivious to it (I admit that I was, until very recently).

Now the list names are prominently displayed in the status update field, as per the screenshot below, so it’s much easier to utilize selected sharing.

Note that you can still use the ‘Custom’ option to include more than one list in your update.

Google Plus has been a big influence on social networking this year, by emphasizing privacy, selected sharing and public updates. Facebook has now countered those initiatives by introducing the new lists (for better privacy and selected sharing) and the Subscribe button (for public sharing, amongst other things).

Although the new Facebook lists are far from perfect, they are a vast improvement over the previous lists. They make it much easier to both view and post to select groups of people, which is something I’ve wanted for some time now. Thanks Google Plus for pushing these features into the social networking landscape; and thanks Facebook for finally implementing them.

Will you be using the new lists?

Discuss

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Facebook is taking this week to launch several platform “improvements” that it has been testing with a select groups of users in the last month. Today, Facebook announced a “subscribe button” that will allow users to filter stories that you want to see in the news feed.

This feature has been rumored to be in the works for a couple of weeks. We wrote about it at the end of August when several users saw it being tested with their accounts. Yet, the subscribe button goes beyond just relevance in the news feed. It fundamentally changes Facbook’s original social contract.

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Facebook evolved around the notion of “balanced following.” You couldn’t be friends with me unless I was a friend to you. At the start, Facebook held tight to that rule. As time went on, that started to evolve and erode where you could see updates of people you had sent a request to even if they had not yet responded. Later, Facebook instituted sharing options where “friends of friends” and such could see your posts if you so chose. We wrote about the Facebook filters in 2010.

The subscribe button changes that.

Here are the three main points Facebook wants you to know about the subscribe button:

1. Choose what you see from people in the news feed
2. Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
3. Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends

How does that adhere in anyway to the balanced follow that Facebook was built on? Really, Facebook is now taking the fundamental nature of “friending” and changing it. On one hand, it brings it much closer to how Twitter and Google Plus work. On the other, it is a distinct departure from how the site was founded.

You can filter the updates you see as well. There are choices between “all updates,” “most updates” or “important updates only.” You can see just photos from a friend, or life events or games they are playing (or a mixture of all those).

Users can add subscribe buttons to their own page if they see fit to do so. For instance, I am a reporter and all my posts go to Facebook (and Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus). Some people may want to subscribe to my Facebook feed to keep up with technology or sports news. If I set my updates as “public” then they will see those posts. You can then filter the types of posts you see from that person. It is not clear how granular the filters will be, but it would be an interesting feature if you could see just mobile stories from me and cut out whenever I write about security, for instance.

What is going to be user feedback to the subscribe button? Is it a betrayal of what Facebook was built on or a necessary feature to keep the news feed relevant and competitive against the likes of Google Plus and Twitter?

Discuss

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The change will come as part of the rollout of the new privacy and location sharing features announced today. Without the dedicated check-in feed, it may be more difficult for users to determine the current location of friends. However, Foursquare and other locations services built around a check-in feed should be pleased about the news of Facebook using location as a layer rather than as content itself.

Facebook launched Places a year ago, allowing users to check in to locations they were within three city blocks of and view a feed of check-ins of friends via m.facebook.com and the native smartphone apps. In April, Facebook added a map view to the iPhone app’s check-in feed to make it easier to tell if friends were nearby.

Some users, especially those in dense urban areas with lots of active Facebook friends, found these features very helpful for finding things to do in real-time. The check-in feed was never brought to the web interface, though, so users without smartphone access had to sift the location of friends out of the entire news feed.

Soon this may be the fate of smartphone users as well, as a Facebook spokesperson tells us “We’ve learned a lot since launching Places. The core insight is that most people on Facebook think about location as part of their everyday experience. The Places check in feed on the mobile app will go away and now a “place” becomes another descriptor to add to any post.”

When users post content from the web, mobile site, or smartphone apps, they’ll have the option to tag a Place, whether they’re there currently or just want to mention it. As TechCrunch illustrates, Facebook’s foot-traffic incentivizing Check-in Deals will still be available, with users seeing the option to redeem them appended to the news feed story of their mention of a location.

Unless Facebook adds a filter to the news feed that only shows posts tagged with specific locations, the change will likely make it harder to find exactly where friends are currently are and meet up with them. Even if Facebook did add a location filter, it wouldn’t be able to tell if a friend had tagged a Place because they were planning to go their in future, had been there in the past, just wanted to discuss it, or are actually there. This may also prevent Facebook from sending helpful push notifications about one’s closest friends checking in nearby.

This could drive users looking to keep track of the current locations of friends to Foursquare, Google Latitude, Gowalla, or other location services. While perhaps valuable to a smaller audience than location as a layer, these services will continue helping users find their friends in real-time.

Making location a component of status updates, photos, and other content will surely give users more context to what their friends are sharing. Those who currently enjoy checking in will probably just post status updates, tag their current location and friends who are with them, and add a description such as “Here at…”. It will also help users plan future meetups by allowing them to tag locations and say they’ll be there in an hour.

Still, it seems unnecessary to remove the check-in feed and the ability to populate that feed by explicitly informing Facebook of one’s current location. The mobile interfaces could keep the feed and use the existing check-in button to indicate real-time location rather than just a mention of a Place.

Instead, Facebook is removing functionality some have grown to enjoy, and ignoring the fact that sometimes location is valuable in its own right, not just as a layer.

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The study also shows a high variance in how much traffic is sourced from search, indicating some Pages do much better at SEO than others and that there is a high potential for gain if Pages execute a smart SEO strategy.

Through its APIs, Facebook shares data about internal and external referral traffic of Pages with their admins. PageLever used data on 1,000 Pages with more than 10,000 fans between January 1st and June 30th, 2011 to conduct the study.

Internal sources include links in the news feed, profiles, as well as Facebook’s internal search engine which has shown to account for the bulk of internal traffic sent to Pages. Overall, external referral traffic only accounts for an average of 27.8% of total traffic to Pages, and those with over a million fans see closer to 8% of their traffic come from outside Facebook.com. In addition to search, external referral traffic is sourced from official websites for businesses, blogs, and other social networks such as Twitter.

Still, the amount of external traffic coming from search is enough to make it worthwhile for Page admins to consider SEO. Optimizing for Google PageRank should be their priority as the other top search engines contribute much less traffic, with Yahoo delivering 4.1% and Bing delivering 2.3 of total external referral traffic.

While trying to court Google PageRank, admins should consider whether they have the best possible name and URL for their Page. They should look to publish links to their website frequently, and have their website reciprocate by posting links to the Page wherever appropriate.

Pages should employ these basic SEO strategies to make sure anyone trying to them from outside of Facebook.com can do so without having to wade through other search results. By combining SEO efforts with compelling default landing tabs that encourage visitors to Like them, Pages can convert this search traffic into additional fans.

A closer look at key Facebook Page search engine optimization strategies can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook. 

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Hike’s template is vector-based, with individual elements set in the exact pixel locations that they occupy on Facebook pages.

Only the icons are not incorporated in the form of vectors.

The layers in the Photoshop documents are named in a manner that speeds the incorporation process.

The template can be viewed in four different ways:

• Wall displays the Facebook page white board with text items.
• Wireframe wall has the details replaced by placeholders.
• Custom tab is a base with items represented by text.
• Custom tab wireframe,  much like the other wireframe option, replaces text components with placeholders.

The use of Photoshop to create Facebook pages seems like it would make things simpler for designers and photographers to create professional presences on the social network.

Readers, have any of you attempted to build a Facebook page via Photoshop?

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Facebook, the biggest online social network, is taking on the Whatsapp’s and iMessages of the App Store world, with a standalone messaging app of its own. Called Facebook Messenger, and launched a few minutes ago, it brings Facebook chat, and recently improved messaging features as a standalone app to your iPhone.

All Facebook messages will be accessible from within the app, allowing users to send and receive their messages. Facebook Messenger will also allow users to message several people at once and send pictures with location information and details. It also includes push notifications so you won’t miss any of your Facebook messages.

Facebook Messenger – Accessing all your contacts

Peter Deng, a Facebook product manager said:

“It’s just that the separate app has a few extra features. All your messages will still be in one place. Your conversation between you and your friends is now accessible anywhere you go.”

The technology behind Facebook Messenger was derived from Beluga, a group messaging app, which Facebook acquired back in March and is still available on the App Store. Facebook Messenger is designed to rival other messaging apps, such as BlackBerry Messenger and Apple’s own upcoming iMessage.

Initially, Facebook messenger will only be available for users in the U.S. and Canada, and only for those who own an iPhone or an Android device. Facebook plans to roll the app out to other markets in the coming weeks.

• Facebook Messenger
• Beluga
• WhatsApp Messenger

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If you already have Publicize active (which you should if you like traffic), you’ll now see a link to set options for Facebook, inside the Facebook block on the Sharing Settings page.

If you click on it, you’ll see a simple dialog box that lists all your available pages to pick from.

If you are new to Publicize, you’ll see a sequence of screens confirming permission to post to your Facebook account, before you see the screens above.

Also note, currently you can only Publicize to one target: either a page or your wall. This should be more than sufficient to get your great posts out to a wide audience of your choosing.

We hope you enjoy this added flexibility in how your blog posts get shared to Facebook.

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Millions of websites use XFBML to render social plugins. We wanted to share some best practices that can improve the performance of these on your websites. Specifically, we offer custom channelUrl and asynchronous loading which, when used, will improve load times and reduce other issues such as double-counting of referral traffic from Facebook.

The custom channel URL is an optional parameter in the FB.init function called channelUrl. When you initialize the JavaScript library, add the channelUrl parameter in the FB.init function:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
 <script src="//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>
 <script>
   FB.init({
     appId  : 'YOUR APP ID',
     status: true, // check login status
     cookie: true, // enable cookies to allow server to access session,
     xfbml: true, // enable XFBML and social plugins
     oauth: true, // enable OAuth 2.0
     channelUrl: 'http://www.yourdomain.com/channel.html' //custom channel
   });
 </script>

The channelUrl points to a file that you add to your local directory which helps improve communication speed in some older browsers. Without the channelUrl, we are forced to use workarounds such as loading a second copy of the webpage in a hidden iframe to properly load social plugins. The workarounds increase load times and inflate referral traffic from Facebook.

To create a channel.html file, add the following line to the file (located at http://www.yourdomain.com/channel.html):

<script src="//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>

If you have the ability to run PHP, we strongly advise setting a long cache for the channelUrl file to ensure optimal performance. Here is a sample PHP script that accomplishes this:

<?php
  $cache_expire = 60*60*24*365;
  header("Pragma: public");
  header("Cache-Control: maxage=".$cache_expire);
  header('Expires: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time()+$cache_expire).' GMT');
?>

<script src="//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>

In this case, you should also set the channelUrl file to the fully qualified URL such as http://www.yourdomain.com/channel.php.

In our testing, adding a custom channelUrl improves the performance in Internet Explorer and therefore its inclusion is advised for all of our developers. Internet Explorer yields statistically significant performance gains when including the parameter, where the load time of a test website with 5 XFBML plugins improves from 1.10 seconds to 0.43 seconds.

Asynchronous loading is another simple tactic that allows your page to load quickly without blocking the loading of other elements of your page. Upon successful loading of the JS SDK, we call the window.fbAsyncInit function. All front-end functions that depend on Facebook API calls should be separated and called via window.fbAsyncInit. This ensures that the Facebook features are loaded in a non-blocking fashion and will speed up its rendering, which has positive SEO benefits. When designing your social features, you should approach it with this mentality to start.

For example:

<html xmlns:fb="https://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
<body>
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>
  /* All Facebook functions should be included
     in this function, or at least initiated from here */
  window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
    FB.init({appId: 'your app id',
             status: true,
             cookie: true,
 	     xfbml: true});

    FB.api('/me', function(response) {
      console.log(response.name);
    });
  };
  (function() {
    var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true;
    e.src = document.location.protocol +
      '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';
    document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
  }());
</script>
</body>
<html>

We’ve updated our documentation to reflect the importance of these options and changed the default sample code to include a channelUrl. We are continuing to update our docs as part of Operation Developer Love as well as share more best practices via “How-To” blog posts. Check out the rest of the collection here.

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Now that we have rolled out banner ads on our My Info and Welcome Tab applications (to page admins only, not to viewers of the pages), we have a few cents a day coming in to help us pay the annual fee for an SSL certificate. So we are now supporting SSL throughout all of our Facebook applications. This means My Greetings, My Places, and My Status also have full SSL support.

This means you can turn on Facebook’s secure browsing preference and seamlessly use our Facebook apps without having to switch out of secure mode. While none of our apps send any sensitive data, it was annoying to our users to have to switch back and forth between secure and unsecured modes.

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1. Tag Others In Your Status Update

Type “@” before someone or something’s name in the status bar. An auto-generated drop-down list of those in your social circle starting with that letter will appear. It works with people, pages, events, brands and companies. Click the name you want, finish the update and hit share. The name becomes a hyperlink and the status shows up on that person’s wall, too.

2. Hide Status Updates From Certain People

On the other side of the coin, you can control who can read your status updates with Facebook’s privacy settings. Click on the padlock next to the “share” button and you can select whether your status update can be seen by everyone, friends of friends, or only friends. Or you can customize it with specific friend lists or individual people, which can be useful for work, special interest groups or if you’re planning a surprise party.

3. Add Symbols

Facebook chat allows for emoticons like the well-known yellow smiley but the status bar does not. The only symbol you can make with shortcut keys is a heart by typing in <3. Instead, you can copy and past universal symbols or Windows users can input various alt + number combinations on a numerical keypad (it doesn’t work on the top row of numbers).

4. Change Your Language

Facebook is offered in many different languages but did you know you can change your Facebook display to “pirate” or upside down English? Pirate makes your status your “plank,” where you can share or “blabber t’ yer mates.” What you type in the status bar won’t become pirate or turn upside down with these options. Just the display will change.

5. Add A Dislike Button

You can’t go anywhere now without seeing a “like” button, but apps like Status Magic can add some more variety to what you think of statuses. You can add a “dislike” button or other emotions such as “disagree,” “love,” “hate” or “LOLs” to any status updates posted with the app.

6. Schedule Status Updates

Social media services like TweetDeck, HootSuite, SocialOomph, Sendible and Later Bro offer a free way to schedule your status updates. Each one is a little different but all require you to sign in with Facebook Connect. Just select your time zone, type your status, set the time of when you want to post and you’re ready.

7. See Worldwide Status Updates

OpenBook allows you to see Facebook status updates of users from around the world, by collecting posts from those whose privacy levels are set to everyone. You can search by gender and keywords on a given topic.

8. Check Your Stats

Status Statistics lets you know how many times you have updated your Facebook status and much, much more. It analyzes your updates and provides a list of how many statuses you have written, the average word count and how many times per day you post. It creates a graph to show what time and what days you normally update and allows you to search for old statuses without having to scroll down your history.

9. Turn Your Status Updates Into A Word Cloud

Status Analyzer 3D takes your status updates and makes a word cloud. It generates a list of words you commonly used and creates a colorful visual.

10. Update Through Firefox

FireStatus allows you to update your status among other features for multiple social networks like Facebook through a Firefox extension. It displays updates from the social networks through notification pop-ups on your desktop.

Readers, do you or will you use any of these tips and tricks?

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“Agent G” Syncs Google+ to Other Sites

To use the service, you must first associate Agent G with your preferred social networking services, using OAuth (on Twitter and Identica) and Facebook Connect.  In testing, the service was a little buggy. It took two times to register Agent G with Twitter, three times to register with Facebook, and we’re still waiting on Identica. Maybe we weren’t being patient enough, but Agent G’s developer Saggi Malachi says the registration process should only take seconds. It did not.

Still, even with its kinks, you have to admit – this is a pretty cool idea. And as for the bugs, the source code will be released in just a few days, so crowd-sourced improvements should follow soon after, or so we hope.

How to Use Agent G

To use Agent G, do the following:

1. Sign in with Identi.ca, Twitter or Facebook on this page: http://gplus.sagg.im. (See the buttons on the upper right of the page.)
2. Once connected, you will be given an authentication string. Create a Google+ post containing your authentication string and share it only with +Agent G.

    

   

3. You can now sync Google+ posts to your connected accounts by simply sharing your post with +Agent G

    

   

    

That’s it!

We should note, there’s a lag here, as well. In tests, syncs between services took several minutes, which is far from being real-time. As they say, your mileage may vary.

But if you do decide to use this service, please remember one thing: if you’re syncing to other services, be prepared to respond on those other services, too. No one likes bot spam!

Discuss

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The report describes these new Facebook editions as “basically, app versions of [the publications] that can be read and consumed right there on Facebook.” The publications said to be working on the project include CNN, the Washington Post and The Daily.

Many publications already use Facebook Pages to distribute links to stories to the news feed, and offer their own integrations with Facebook on their sites. They can build apps for Pages to provide a more customized interface for their content on their own. And they have in various ways over the years. The Washington Post currently displays an app allowing users to browse political headlines from their Facebook Page, and The New Yorker has used a Like-gated, fans-only app to force users to subscribe to their Page’s update if they want to read certain articles.

In this case, though, Facebook may be contributing design and backend expertise to facilitate the development process. This help may lower the cost of building the apps enough that publications see a clearer road to return on investment.

Facebook itself has recently been on a campaign to increase its presence in the media ecosystem, which we assume this latest effort is a part of. In the past year it has hired social media marketers to help it develop and promote best practices for journalists, provided training events for media, and published guides and studies showing how to use Facebook features (especially Pages) for maximum value. Media companies, including the BBC and Warner Brothers and various musicians, have also been testing selling media content using its virtual currency, Credits — efforts that have been primarily independent, although presumably encouraged by Facebook.

The Forbes report suggests that there could be a revenue-sharing agreement as part of the special Facebook editions. If that’s the case, we expect it’d be through Credits as well — some sort of setup where a media company provides paywall-only content in an app, that users pay Credits to access. The revenue-share in this scenario wouldn’t be anything unique, but rather the 30% cut that Facebook takes from all Credits purchases.

Another possibility, that many of us have speculated about for years, is that Facebook might one day roll out some version of its advertising system that is a targeted ad network for other web sites, similar to Google’s Adsense. Facebook has regularly downplayed the rather obvious of an Open Graph ad unit idea, but the promise is clearly there with media companies. They provide content, Facebook provides development assistance, user traffic, the user data, and the targeted off-site ads, and gets a cut of the revenue.

The speculation around possible Credits and ads revenue here are reflections of Facebook’s oft-stated goal of being the main way that people find and share information that matters with people they care about. Without any additional revenue streams, simply getting a stronger two-way flow of content-driven traffic can help it create more value for users, and make more money from its existing ad inventory.

In response to the report, Facebook is saving the full response for later: “We have nothing new to announce. The top media sites around the world are integrated with Facebook and we’re constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations.” Forbes says the new editions could be coming later this year, possibly in September.

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Alexis Madrigal says at The Atlantic that video chat is like cup holders in a car, essential only because of their ubiquity, but “to treat the ability to video chat in any form as tantamount to transforming communication would be reaching too far.” Michael Arrington says, in a story headlined to imply that there is a clear winner (“no contest”), that the two products don’t in fact overlap and don’t really compete. I’m going to argue otherwise; I believe Google Plus Hangouts are clearly superior.

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Facebook’s new integration with Skype is commendable and will clearly bring joy to millions if not hundreds of millions of people. It’s available to all Facebook users today and is more a little more intuitive to use in a one-on-one chat than Google Plus is.

But you know what? Google Plus isn’t that difficult to set up for one-on-one conversation. You click to Start a Hangout, then you deselect the Public option, then you begin to enter a contact’s name and click one of the auto-complete suggestions. Then an invite is sent to that person. There is a risk that you’ll send it to the wrong email address. There is a risk that a person invited into a single-person chat won’t clearly see and understand the invitation.

I’ll bet those limitations will likely be resolved by the end of next week. Google Plus is fresh and new, it’s changing fast and its user experience team is paying a lot of attention to feedback from the probably millions of people testing the system so far. User experience is quite good throughout the rest of the site, all they have to do is smooth over a few rough edges and the Google Plus team will be able to offer its users the same functionality Facebook can and more.

By the end of this month one difference is going to separate Google Plus Hangouts and Facebook Skype: on Google you can video chat with more than one person if you want to. On Facebook you do not have that option, you will be limited to one-to-one video calling for the foreseeable future.

In the future, Google Hangout’s features like autofocus on speaking parties, video sharing and hopefully a more open API will all be relevant as well.

Of course the bigger picture battle between these two networks is another story, I’m just saying that Plus did a better job on video than Facebook.

Skype charges users $5 to $10 per month for multi-person video chat. It’s not cheap to provide. Google Plus will use it as a loss-leader and as an important feature differentiation over Facebook. It will eat the cost of high-bandwidth multiperson video chat in order to attempt to capture market share in social networking. Some observers say the Google Hangout system is architected in a way that puts much of the technical burden on the client side, or the end user’s computers. That should help.

I suspect people will like group video chats too, especially young people. That remains an open question (ReadWriteWeb’s Audrey Watters asks this afternoon Do Consumers Really Want Video Chat?) but I think social networking plus video equals more video. And the option of multi-person video is better than the limitation of single-person video calls.

This is just one of many weapons that Google Plus will bring to the battle against Facebook, but I think it’s an important one. The ability to watch YouTube videos together, to do quick, free, multi-person video calls, and to collaborate with small groups – I think those are going to be important features that Facebook just won’t offer for some time.

It probably won’t be enough to put Google Plus over the top and clearly Plus is nowhere near as widespread as Facebook, nor as tested with mainstream users. But which video chat feature is better? I think it’s clearly the one the provides more than one option.

Discuss

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A tab in the left-hand column on Facebook’s home page will lead to a music dashboard that would include Spotify and possibly other music-streaming services, according to GigaOm.

Spotify is Europe’s most popular music streaming service, and has been working out deals with U.S. recording labels in order to complete integration with Facebook.

However, Spotify already allows its users to share on Facebook information about what music they are listening to via the service. But the integration underway would put a music dashboard into the social network.

The dashboard could ultimately incorporate the likes of Pandora, Turntable.fm, SoundCloud and iTunes, in addition to Spotify, and present a snapshot of all the music tracks you have saved in your accounts with these respective services.

Logging on to any of these services using one’s Facebook credentials would put the music tab onto the home page of the social network. It would also put a play and pause button on the bottom of the home page.

The music dashboard may include:

• Notifications of what your friends are listening to, including whether any of them are tuning into things you’ve recommended or that you like.
• Recommended songs based on what your friends are listening to, with links to play them.
• A list of what songs are listened to the most by all of your friends.
• A list of which albums are the most popular among all your friends, with album art included.
• A list of what your friends have listened to most recently.
• A “happening now” ticker in the top-right-hand corner of the screen would summarize all of the newest things happening in music relevant to your interests.

Of course, it’s one thing to promise lots of features, and another to deliver them. We’ve yet to learn exactly when the music dashboard will become available on Facebook and which of the aforementioned capabilities will be part of the first iteration.

Readers, what do you think about the promised music dashboard?

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The Send dialog will help drive referral traffic to apps whose content is too private to be shared with a user’s entire friend list. Facebook says it will be especially helpful for developers of ecommerce, travel, and event websites and apps, and it’s already active on Airbnb, Gogobot, Keepsy, Jetsetter, SniqueAway, and Viagogo.

Facebook released the Send button on April 25th to complement the share-to-all-friends Like button, take over functionality of its now deprecated Share button, and replace email buttons used on some sites. Today the company notes that 100,000 sites integrated the Send button in the first month, indicating the need for the private sharing capabilities that will be expanded through the Send Dialog.

Developers can now begin building the Send dialog into their flows using the code found in Facebook’s documentation. Similar to the Like button, it does not require extended permissions from a user, though this dialog does not currently support mobile usage. A Facebook employee tells us “Currently the Send Dialog activity is not available in Insights; we are planning to add this functionality in the near future.” This means developers should soon be able to see metrics about Send dialog views and clicks, and views and clicks of inbox Messages sent through the Send dialog, similar to data reported by the Send button.

Facebook says “the Send Dialog is appropriate when a person might otherwise send a personal email” and shouldn’t be used to communicate impersonal content such as of in-game status or to deliver invites. Facebook apps should instead use the Requests channel for that type of content.

Photo book site Keepsy is using the Send dialog so that users can share the photo books they’ve made from a combination of private photos and Facebook photos with the friends tagged in those photos. Rather than use the less customizable Send button, Keepsy displays a tab when you finish creating a photo book that says “Tell your friends” and shows the faces of tagged friends. When clicked, a Send dialog appears pre-populated with those friends as recipients.

The Facebook Message sent through the dialog could lead those friends back to the Keepsy site where they could buy the photobook. In this way the Send dialog generates traffic and sales without forcing users to share a link with all their friends that might lead to private photos.

By providing more ways for developers to access the microsharing functionality of the Send button, Facebook may be able to drive more traffic to niche and private content without filling the news feed with stories that are irrelevant or not suitable for all of a user’s friends.

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